


Learning the Game

by Foxmane



Category: Splatoon
Genre: ...and You Might Get This, Add a Pinch of Spies..., And a Smodge of Burlesque..., Bit o' Dickens, Cook in a Marmite over a Low Fire..., Dash o' Sports Movie, Edwardian Children's Fiction brought to Splatoon, Gen, Mystery, Stock Market
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-05-20 03:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19368748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxmane/pseuds/Foxmane
Summary: Gelert was different: unlike so many Inklings around him, he had never wanted to live inside the ring of hostels that framed Inkopolis Square. But sometimes you have to make the best of things.The sniper didn't say much. But, unlike the chatterers of the city, he didn't have to: when you're that good, people tend to listen -- even to an adult.So why is he striking up a turfing team in the middle of the Square, where no adult goes? What is he playing at?





	1. Marksmanship

**Author's Note:**

> The author prefers to be as invisible in his stories as possible, so he shall keep this preface brief.
> 
> I do not often write fanfiction these days. When I do, it is because I become intrigued enough by a world that I get to have a story that can ONLY be told in that world. I also have strict rules with which I bind my hands for this kind of rare effort:
> 
> 1) No canon character may appear.
> 
> 2) If any canon character does appear, he or she must be essentially a blank slate onto which flesh, breath, and soul together may be built.
> 
> 3) The themes and worldbuilding of the source material shall be explored as thoroughly as possible.
> 
> This story is therefore, as has been put pithily somewhere, a 'happening somewhere else' sort of tale. In it, I apply myself to transform all of the themes of Splatoon into a new whole. If you seek it in the original, you will, eventually, find it here. You will find no Agents here; but that does not mean you might not find secret agents at work. 
> 
> Above all, when I attempt a fanfiction these days, it is an experiment in style. In this story, I am pushing my writing to the limit of my powers. My style is heavily influenced by Diana Wynne Jones, E. Nesbitt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and that will come out strongly in this story.
> 
> I am seeking to improve my skill in storytelling in this very particular style, and I am keenly interested to hear the impressions of readers. If I can entertain the reader, in my own particular idiom, I will have accomplished my chiefmost aim; if I can impress the reader thoroughly with the experiences I wish to convey in these pages, I will fulfill my higher ambition here.
> 
> Yours Truly,
> 
> \--Foxmane

**Learning the Game**

 

A  _Splatoon_  story by Foxmane

 

_Chapter 1: Marksmanship_

 

The problem with Inkopolis, thought Gelert as he lay on his belly watching the battle for turf that they were losing down below, was that it was too much like the sniper beside him: it would laugh and clap you on the shoulder and say, 'hello, friend!' – and then it grinned and shot you in the the head the moment your back was turned.

'Oooh, you  _almost_  had it!' the sniper half-sang as the other team's roller, a girl whose beak-points glinted with a green smear of frustration, crumpled into a smudge on the blacktop. She had gone for cover, just in that place, three times now. She had nearly made it on the last.

'Let her think she's gaining ground,' said the sniper. Gelert could not be entirely sure that the sniper was talking to him. 'Makes them mad. Your enemy gets mad, you get more than just time.'

'I should be down there,' Gelert said. He did not try to conceal the agitated warble in his voice. 'We're losing.'  _And I'm doing nothing but clenching my suckers_ , he thought.

'No need to champ your beak at me, son,' the sniper replied, still in that singsong way that made Gelert's eyes swim with green irritation.

'I'm an  _inker_ ,' Gelert spat. His hand shook on the Splattershot that he carried. 'Those were my orders.' He thought of the look the captain had given him when she first looked him over, like he had just oozed his way out of the warm womb of the hatching-cradle. She wasn't even  _wrong_ , exactly. How would he ever get another team to give him a chance after this?

'You? Son, not on your life. I take one look at you, I see a backliner if ever there was one.' There was a shot, a whiff of ozone, and across the field, over on the other tower, a white oxford crumpled to the ground. The long-barreled charger which fell to the pavement atop it misfired and blew with the back-pressure, spraying a spatter of blue to the left of the concrete barrier that made up their cover. It made Gelert realize that there had been an excellent line of sight right to his left temple from where he peeped out for a better look. He edged himself closer to the sniper.

'See, that one? Too much starch in his tentacles. That kind, he  _thinks_  stiff. To him, charger's not a back-line job. Him, he wants his chance at the front, even if it doesn't do a lick of good to have his boots on the ground. He'd rather be down and drown in his own glory than dawdle back behind, even when that's where's he's bound to be most good, so he tries to go at his own front. He doesn't cover ground, and not his team, neither. He'll be back, but won't have learned a thing. You watch.'

 _SPLAT!_  Just like that, and another of those thousand little half-deaths of a turf war was over and done in a moment. The girl with the roller had come back quickly and had rolled one of their own front-liners to a green paste. Gelert heard the feeble cry of the captain's best mate, the boy who had picked at the seam of his brown jerkin – one of the few things that he had been allowed to take with him from the farm – and smiled at him with what he thought must be a kind look.

* * *

'What do you call this?' the other boy said, rubbing Gelert's clothing over in a very forward way that he had had to get used to since coming to Inkopolis. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that they just cared more about these things here.

'It's… just what we always wear on the farms. We wear it on market days in the village, too. It's just normal stuff,' said Gelert. 'We wear much better things on Sol's Day.'

'I've  _never_  seen clothes like this!' said the other boy, lost in an ecstasy of admiration. He piped an appreciative whistle as he ran his finger along the good stitching of the pointed sharkhide shoes that were still on Gelert's feet. 'You must have dropped a fortune on them!'

Gelert thought of the way the old squids had saved up and eaten cattails and water reeds to buy hand-me-downs for the hatchlings. He looked down at his feet.

'Something like that,' was all that he said.

'Fresh, cousin!' he said, clapping Gelert on the back with a hearty slap. He was not strong, not in the way that work on the farm would get you, lifting feed sacks and trawling nets, but he wasn't weak, either, the way that some Inklings in the city were. Nothing about him stood out, really: he was dressed in loud logos all over, but compared to the captain – an Inkling girl whose tentacles drooped low and fell like a cataract around her shoulders, and who was dressed in skirts of plain, fiery blue, with eyes to match that burned like seawater – there was so much less of him there. Still, he seemed nice, which was a nice change. Gelert had grinned back at him, but the boy just turned aside to the captain. The two shared a brief exchange that was more in glances than with words. Then they turned, together, and smiled, showing Gelert all of their beak-points at once.

'Hey, cousin,' said the captain, putting out her white arm in front of his nose. The umber ink that coursed beneath the outer membrane came out onto the surface and congealed, making four glyphs. 'Read that.'

* * *

 _BLAM!_  roared the sniper's charger. As if she had been expecting it this time, the girl with the roller dove behind a yellow inflatable barrier so that only her ankle was grazed by the shot. She put her head out long enough, when she knew the sniper must be recharging his weapon, to shake her fist at the tower on their side.

'Cowards!' The word carried, shrill and with a weird, warbling intonation, up over the noise of the struggle. It stung Gelert as if he had been the one shot.

'Had to give that one a scare,' the sniper said between the basso notes of a humming tune. 'Being scared makes squelchers mad.' A few more bars, and the sniper turned his attention back to the fray. A nut-brown boy in a violently pink hoodie and high-tops inking for blue raised his umbrella up over his head with a wordless battle-instinct. The sniper got him through the stomach instead.

There was a patter of feet and a squelching through ink from behind Gelert. He started and turned his head – just in time to see the look of disgust that the captain's mate shot at the two of them, sprawled out motionless on their bellies. 'You'll never ink in this town again,  _Wommly_ ,' he said, champing his beak at them both. But he did not say anything to the sniper before he had melted down and was coursing back to the battle for the center.

* * *

' _Wommly_ ,' Gelert had said, not at all certain, squinting at the close glyphs on the captain's arm. What kind of a word was that, anyway? Why did they keep smiling at him like that?

'Say it again,' the captain purred, this time making the glyphs so large that there could be no mistaking them.

' _Pretty_  please, cousin?' said the captain's mate, with something in the word that seemed awfully like a sneer.

'Wommly,' Gelert said, mystified, and wondering what in the world he had done wrong. The captain and her mate could hardly keep their shapes, they laughed so hard. It was a hard laugh, with sharp corners.

'Cousin says "wommly!"' the captain's mate ululated. He struck Gelert on the back again, hard enough to break the membrane. Gelert winced.

'It's  _woomy_ , freshie!' howled the captain, hoisting her huge round blasting-pistol onto her shoulder. Gelert only then noticed just how tall she was. 'Hey, cousin. Can you say, "shibboleth"?'

'Sibbolet', said Gelert, with a sinking knowledge that it would be wrong.

Both roared with laughter.

* * *

'Don't pay them any mind, son,' said the sniper. 'They're frontliners – they don't think like us. You show them what a good backliner can do.'

 _Nothing_ , thought Gelert as the blue team's roller claimed their captain with a brutish swing that sprayed her mate with a fine spatter of green. He saw the numinous glow waft up from where the captain had stood behind a covering wall, trying desperately to retake lost ground, and he felt the illocal pricks of anger and annoyance, full of wordless  **worthless** es,  **slug-a-bed** s, and  **good-for-nothing** s as she flickered back to base to take enough ink for a new body.

Nothing. Do-nothing. Good-for-nothing.

It was no way to win a war.

'Oooh, she's a dense one,' said the sniper, clacking his tongue approvingly. One of his shots had spattered the shoulder of the blue team's roller, but she just snarled and went to ink in a patch of blue. 'That's strategy, that is. Give most of your ink to your main frontline weapon for the endgame. Smart move for the final push. You be ready too, son.'

'For what?' Gelert said bitterly, wondering why he had ever listened to the sniper.

'For her.'

The caterwaul of the final minute of the turf roar seemed to come like a thunderbolt from the loudspeakers.

' _Wooo-ong!_  Wong wong!'  _One minute left_ , pealed the eerie and un-Inkish voice of the judge. It had been loud enough when Gelert had just come to watch the daily strife to ink a patch of ground that was all Inkopolis ever seemed to think about. It seemed even louder now that he was in one. He jumped into a crouch behind their cover, and his hands wandered and worried over the Splattershot that was in them.

'I  _have_  to go,' he said – half to himself, half to the sniper beside him. Now the loudspeakers were broadcasting the countdown.  _Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight_. 'We're going to  _lose_.'

'Steady,' said the sniper. He did not move a micron; he may as well have been made of concrete himself, just like the barrier Gelert had cowered behind all this time.

'But what good is it to…!'

'Just wait, son.' And that was all that he said. And without quite knowing why he did – or knowing why he wanted to – Gelert obeyed.

 _Fifty-six. Fifty-five_.  _Fifty-four_

It seemed to Gelert that there was a terrible lot of time to think in the spaces between the numbers of the countdown. You could hear the heated currents of your own ink in the interstitial silences between the full-throated numbers, each one coming with all the sudden force and insistence of a gunshot. Gelert found himself remembering with something like the urgent blear between life and death when one has had a terrible shock.

* * *

For the sake of the Flood, why were they  _laughing_  at him? What had he done  _wrong_? Gelert's hands clenched to fists so hard that they lost their tone and his palms began to drip his native violet ink down into the wire grate that formed the floor of the waiting room of the broadcasting tower that was the hub of Inkopolis sport. When he noticed, he prayed the Sea that they  _hadn't_ , and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. He focused only on breathing, on the gentle feel of oxygen diffusing across his inner membrane, on the itch of the old threadworn scale-fiber jerkin he had worn from the farm – anything at all to think of anything but the looks that they gave him that, no matter how dim or how fresh you were, you could not mistake for anything but a jeer.

Gelert did not hear the door of the waiting-room glide open on its pneumatic track. His throat let loose a garbled yelp before he realized that a hand, not unfriendly and still warm from the sunshine outside, had planted itself firmly on his shoulder from behind.

'Eeyo! Saw there was a first-come room needing a fourth. You little paint-swodges have somebody yet to swish your mantles, or can one old cadger play?'

The first thing that you noticed was that the sniper stank; he had the stale, briny smell of an Inkling who has lived long enough so that his ink flowed slow like paste. Like any Inkling just come into his majority, Gelert  _hated_  that smell. Here in Inkopolis, the young Inklings seemed to have their own town-within-a-town and seldom ventured out beyond the outer bounds of hostelries and the metro line. If you went any further, you began to catch a whiff of that briny smell wafting up out of the metro stations as the trains were coming in. It reeked of workaday despair. And the adults, with their stale, stagnant bodies, were content to have the Inkopolis outside. If Gelert had learned anything since coming to the city, it was that this rule just wasn't broken. Not unless you absolutely had to.

Like most adults, he was no taller than they; but he was thin, even to the point of gauntness, and the blank black clingsuit that clung to his legs and arms only added to the impression of wasting; yet neither the jaunty way his purple shirt with its print of white hibiscus flowers hung half-open off his shoulders, nor the way that the light from the room monitor flashed and glinted off his grinning break-points and mirrored sunglasses, nor the way his fingers beat an impatient rhythm on the band of his black-and-purple camo shorts seemed to speak even a whisper of feebleness. There was, instead, a whipcord strength lying just below the surface, and Gelert found himself standing straighter in front of this intruding, stinking  _adult_  without even thinking. An old charger rifle, its long black barrel well used but obviously well kept, lay holstered across his back. A pair of brass dog tags hung on a chain that seemed only a little less thin than his neck.

The sniper smiled. Gelert decided, right then and there, he did not like him.

* * *

_Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight._

The blue team was pushing. There wasn't any room left to question now: they were good. The captain's mate put up a brief, brave firefight against the blue team's sharpshooter at the bottom of the ramps at the base of the green tower, but he was crushed again in the next moment under the blue roller heavy with ink. The blue brute of a girl who swung the heavy weapon as if it were a bit of string laughed lustily, and Gelert heard their own captain burble a curse and dive for safety into a field of green that was slowly but surely being pushed further and further back.

 _KRAK!_  The sniper's aim was true again, crumpling a timid boy clutching a sloshing-bucket who had been acting as the blue team's inker, always standing diffidently back with his toes turned in while the blue line advanced.

'Sweet Santa Mare! We'd have had trouble if I'd missed that,' said the sniper with a low whistle.

They had worse trouble, thought Gelert. It was carrying a roller. And from the sound of it, trouble was on the level below, where it knew it couldn't be shot at from a long-range charger.

'We're still losing,' said Gelert. He wondered if the sniper was one of those people who only care about what they want out of a turf war, rather than helping their team win. There had been some like that even back on the farm. Gelert remembered that he hadn't liked them much then, either.

'Then what are you waiting for, son? An engraved invitation? Get on it if you have time to run your mouth!'

Gelert felt the hot flush of anger course through his neck. He had opened his mouth for a riposte when he saw, really  _saw_  the field for the first time. He understood, all in moment, what the sniper had been trying to do – and how one lob of a slosher would have undone it all. He had his orders.

 _Well, why couldn't he have just said it from the beginning?_  Gelert grumbled to himself as he dribbled himself down the wall, being very careful to keep out of sight of the girl with the roller.

 _Forty-one. Forty. Thirty-nine_.

* * *

'You any good, old man?' the captain had asked, rankling her nose at the old Inkling.

'Just awful. Couldn't hit the fat end of a humpback if I spat at it,' the sniper replied, throwing a smirk that showed just what he thought the question was worth.

'Charger, huh?' said the captain's mate, while the captain herself tried to decide, with some apparent difficulty, whether or not she ought to be insulted.

'Best you'll get in Inkopolis, boy. Want my letters of reference? I also do birthday parties,' the sniper said with a weezy laugh that Gelert could see from the frisson of annoyance that twitched below the captain's black mask – if it had been intended for that – had hit home.

'Old man,' said the captain. She closed her eyes as if to calm herself. 'You shoot a good charger, that's fine by me. You deliver, you can splat with us. You don't, you go. That's the rule for everybody. Understood?'

'Hey, I speak threat just as well as I do Inkling. No need to shout.' The sniper's smile did not waver, but the captain turned her back on him.

'Whatever. It's Moray Towers for this game. Just keep them off our base and we'll take care of the rest.'

'Oh, yes, sir!' the sniper shot back with a crisp salute. The captain seethed. Her mate's eyes twitched to-and-fro between the two, and he wrung his hands in the thick quiet that had suddenly filled the waiting room like a thick, clinging fog.

Then there were three loud pips through the speaker, a sucking, metallic sound, and before you quite knew what was happening, the transporter in the room had rattled to hissing, pneumatic life. The image on the screens shifted to a smiling face with lime-green tentacles. Gelert's stomach sank – lime-green was an awful colour if you weren't used to making it. He always felt wrung-out and queasy and in need of a long soak in cool, comfortable purple after trying to go lime-green. He promised himself he would find a quiet corner of the youth hostel later to do just that, even as the sickly, feverish pricks of lime-green spread itself over his body from the top of his head down to his shoes. As the captain and her mate stepped up to the transporter to the match-grounds, he felt uncomfortably like throwing up.

'Hoy,' said the sniper suddenly as the captain was about to drip down into the pneumatic tubes, which were whistling low and steady like a tea kettle. The sniper pointed a long clawed thumb at Gelert. 'What about him?'

The captain crossed her arms over her chest. 'The  _freshie_  can play inker.'

'Even beginners can be useful as inkers,' said the captain's mate – which was about as unhelpful a thing as anyone could think of to say. The captain turned her sneer on  _him_  for a moment before she fell into the transporter with a sudden splash. The captain's mate hesitated a moment, unsure if he ought to – or perhaps even if he  _wanted_  to follow – but duty, or something enough like it won out, and he dripped down into the transporter after her.

'Phew!' said the sniper, staring at the spot they had been moments before. 'She's a doll, isn't she?'

There didn't seem to be any reasonable response to that. Gelert did not hesitate not to give one.

'Anyhow,' the sniper went on, chroming himself over to lime-green without even an apparent drop of effort, 'what about you, son? Got a game plan?'

'No,' said Gelert, who was liking the sniper less and less. The guilty, itchy feeling that he really didn't have a good reason did not help. 'Inking, I guess. It's a turf war,' he added, a little reproachfully.

'You?' Gelert somehow felt the squinting, searching eyes peering at him from behind the blank face of those sunglasses, turning him this way and that to get a look from all angles like a bait-minnow in a bowl.

'Well, what  _should_  I do then?' Gelert demanded, growing rather warm. Who did this shriveled old squid think that he was? How  _dare_  he! Gelert turned his back to the sniper and began to stomp toward the transporter.

'You? An inker?' the sniper repeated in a voice that bubbled with derision. 'Not a chance, son. Not you. You're meant for better.'

Gelert had been about to drip himself down into the pneumatics. He stopped. 'What?'

'You go out inking will-i nil-i, this team loses. Inking takes brass guts and eyes like a manta, and you ain't got either. Not yet, anyhow.'

The sniper stepped up beside Gelert and beamed his three toothy beak-points at the younger. Without the slouching coral hat bearing a Grizzco logo that was on the sniper's head, the two were less than a mussel beard's different in height. 'Here's what you do: you hang back with me at the base. You watch; you wait; you listen. Your chance will come, son – I'll see to that.'

* * *

 _Thirty-two. Thirty-one. Thirty_.

The difficult part, Gelert thought as he swam through the narrow deer-trail the sniper's shot had cut left of center, away from the  _fracas_  that was still being played out for the all-important control of the same, wasn't so much the not being seen. He had always been decent at that in the little turf scuffles the hatchlings had been allowed back on the farms. Rather, it was knowing what to do once you got there. Blue's charger hadn't joined the push yet, either. He wasn't nearly as good as the sniper – Gelert had to  _think_  it, even if he didn't want to outright  _say_  it – but if he spotted Gelert while he was inking the enemy base…

Gelert swallowed. Being splatted wasn't pleasant, no matter how you wanted to lie to make it less awful to yourself. He ducked his mantle up out of the ink, saw nothing, came up from the trail of lime-green and began to run, as low to the ground as he could, spraying the blue-smeared concrete ramps as he ascended.

By now, the captain and her mate on green had rebounded and, in spite of the odds, were still managing to just hold the line. Both chargers were silent: each was waiting on a hair-trigger to push back the opposing line if a push were to come through in the last moments. It was as perfect a stalemate as you would hope never to see in a turf war, Gelert thought as he threw a quick glance toward the embattled center. But try as they might, even two veterans together could not take down the girl in blue with her awful roller – which came down again upon the captain's mate with a squelch and a yawp of bumptious triumph. Gelert shivered, but he kept running.

And because he was rather less aware than one ought be, he ran smack into the back of blue's charger, who coughed in surprise and fumbled his shot. It sailed high, but the sound of the discharge was loud enough to be heard even over the caterwaul of the last-minute countdown. So, too, was his high-pitched yelp of 'help! infiltration!' that erupted out of the boy before Gelert could put his Splattershot to the boy's temple and liquidate him properly. The boy was splatted, too late, and groaned as he melted – much too loud.

A splat! A real splat! In Inkopolis! Gelert wanted to shout from the battle lust that was ripping through him like a shudder that felt far too good to be healthy. He wanted to be sick – he had just  _splatted_  someone! Just like that, cool as you please! He knew he didn't have time to wallow in either; the boy's words had been heard. The girl with the roller had  _seen_  him. He could see her predatory eyes glaring up at him from out of the blue that covered the center as her mantle gorged with ink, preparing herself to leap upon him. Gelert expected the weighted heft of a roller squelching through the top of his membrane with every gasp of air, which could not diffuse across his membrane fast enough to keep pace with the oily thrum of his heart. 'Just keep inking,' he said firmly as more and yet more of the ramp, blue like a water-course, bloomed into lime-green, as if struck by a sudden algal bloom. Gelert kept running.

 _Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two_.

Gelert heard the dull  _SPLASH_  of a landing and the squelching  _CLOP-PAT CLOP-PAT_ of heavy boots in ink coming up the ramp behind him. He turned – and that was his first mistake. He froze as the blue squad's roller turned her face up to him. She was  _bloated_  with ink. The patches of lime-green that clung to her mantle and maroon jacket might as well have been air for all that she seemed to feel them, nor did the lime-green which sucked at the soles of her boots slow her in the least. Then she smiled, furiously, and Gelert could not help staring – which was his second mistake.

Her beak points, one upon the upper jaw, the other its apposite mirror on the lower, were in the wrong places. Her suckers were on the  _out_ side of the tentacles that piled up on her head. Her eyes were cruel, hard, listless, merciless, full of malice – all for him. The word, what she was, came like a startled shout inside his head.  _Octoling_. Gelert's heart skipped. The roller-girl was an  _Octoling_!

 _Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen_.

Gelert had heard the stories that the old squids told the hatchlings on warm summer evenings after a cull, when the festal songs were sung and each Inkling gave his thanks to the Sea his mother, and prayed for the mercy of that unseen Lord of the Air who had dealt so sternly with the Precursors, and feasted around the bonfires on the runtlings of the fish harvest which were unfit to be sent into the city. There, under the stars, they wove tales of the glories of the Great War over the land and sang the ballad of the Cuttlefish Charge that turned the tide of the battle of Catfish Quay: and with it came the warning tales and beastly horrors of the Octarians, and how at every curl and furl of a tentacle they meant death and torments for Inklings. In every act, in every cruel stratagem, they proved themselves un-squidlike in every heartless way their brains, which went right down into their arms if you could believe it, could possibly devise. And the Octolings were the worst of all.

'It's their laugh – that's the worst of all.' The old squids relished the telling, widening every lurid detail with expansive gestures that made every indulgent smile for the dripping squidlings into the grimace of a monster out of the deeps. 'They save it for when you've got nothing left to shoot back with, and nowhere left to run to. They have ways to only half-splat you. They'll right over your legs and make you watch while they do it. And worse!' And the squidlings keening cries always went up, and they clutched at one another for comfort even if they had heard it all before.

'I don't want to be rolled up!' Gelert bawled. He always hated this part of the stories.

'Hush, you ninny!' said the girl who had clutched at Gelert, because it was the done thing. The way, though, that she was doing her clutching at the ends of her tentacles, which had not yet fully spread into digitopodes, showed that she did not think much of the kind of boy who would go soft listening to old fish-tales. 'It's just a story.'

'And  _far_  worse than that did the Octarians do,' said the old squid telling the old tales with a glint in his eye so that he was not a little like an Octoling himself. 'For they were only a hair as smart as a wee little inksquirt like you, but they were as vicious as any Octoling, and never did one of them know how to stop even if you  _did_  wave the white flag. That's because each and every one weren't a bit more than one of the Octoling's tentacles clave off and budgin' about on its own, like nothing more than when your milk-beak falls out. Imagine if it up and tried to bite you back!'

Gelert whimpered; he didn't like imagining either one.

'Pooh!' said the girl, thrusting Gelert aside as if he had been a slimy perambulating Octarian himself. 'And I thought boys were  _supposed_  to be brave. Anyhow, it's just stories! The Octolings got theirs in the war. It's not like you'll ever see one walking around Inkopolis.' And both she and the old squid had laughed. Another time, in another place, Gelert may have felt like laughing himself that they had turned out so risibly wrong. But  _not_  – he gulped – when there was an Octoling hurling up the ramp toward him, who brought up all the old fears of all the old stories screaming into Gelert's ears. He saw his legs being rolled up under him while he watched, while the captain and her mate stood by, and pointed, and laughed – just laughed.

Gelert ran for his life.

'You do not get to fly!' the Octoling bellowed. She bowed her legs and leapt with a frightful energy, swinging her roller like a club heavy with ink and aspergating the whole ramp with a spray of blue that struck the ground like grapeshot, and stung like hail. Gelert was quick enough to squid himself and dive into the green to evade the payload, but his ankles began to throb with the dull, soapy ache of enemy ink the instant he came up again, gulping air across his membrane. He was lame; and the Octoling was still just a few steps behind.

'Hold on!' rang out the voice of the captain's mate – Gelert thought that he must be dreaming – from somewhere up above. And before he quite knew what was happening, the captain's mate had landed at the base of the ramp, below the Octoling, where Gelert had been only seconds before, and threw a bust-balloon bulging out lime-green ink at her, all in one liquid motion. In another moment, he had dropped into a crouch, madly firing his squelcher-pistols at the blue devil.

The Octoling hardly acknowledged the storm of green being thrown at her. She just turned and threw out a sort of smiling snarl, and raised her roller in both hands–

The eyes of the captain's mate went wide. 'Run, cousin!' he yelled. 'Before she–!'

Then there was a wave of blue, a sound like choking, and the captain's mate was gone. Gelert knew that he had been bought seconds by the mate's actions, if that. But – what should he do?

'You next!' cackled the Octoling, whirling her grotesque body around. 'Sneaking little prawngulper!' She raised her roller, bloated with pride, and Gelert founds that his poor legs, which had never been strong, had nothing left to give in the face of this kind of creature.

 _I am going to be splatted_ , he thought to himself.  _In Inkopolis_. It was not a comforting notion. Grimly, he raised his Splattershot, determined to go down fighting, to buy a few more seconds for the rest. No matter what, he couldn't just melt and let an  _Octoling_  win – what would the old squids think?

Suddenly, the Octoling's head snapped to the side, in the very instant she had been about to swing. There was a flash over on the green tower that had been bright enough to see in the dwindling light. A moment later, Gelert understood: he, too, heard the mechanical whine that cut through the screaming countdown, and he knew what it must mean. It was too far for it to be possible – but he was sure that he saw the sniper wink at him from his perch on the other tower.

'Rat in the corner!' shouted the Octoling in a blind passion, dropping her roller as well as what seemed to be  _gallons_  of blue ink from off her as she dove, so uncannily like an Inkling but with a weird, rounded mantle, in a desperate effort to evade the Stingray-brand Pigmalance that ripped, half-tangible, through the concrete where she had stood not a second before. And because not even the sniper could swing a Stingray Pigmalance fast enough for it to matter, as it was rather like trying to shift a barn support with your bare forearm, she might have even got away, swimming through the oleaginous torrent that had only just instants before been herself, had Gelert (who hardly knew what he was doing) not raised the splat bomb that had hung at his waist for the whole match up to his ear. He felt the ink slipping out of his bladder, into his depleted reservoir, and out again into the little tetrahedron like one who stands outside of his own body from habit. The boy who threw it at the angry full of his strength, who screamed a wordless, raging something and took up his Splattershot, and began to chase after his own grenade – that was somebody else. He frightened Gelert a little.

At the sound of the sudden scream, two white sclera peeped out of the cascading blue, darting around for the source. They went staring and wide, then blank and dazed as Gelert's missile struck the ripple where he somehow  _knew_  that she must be. She did not see the percussive wave of green that washed over her as the splat bomb beeped, and lighted, and swelled with the internal pressure of the detonator – although perhaps that was for the best.

As for Gelert, even he was only dimly aware of the wild scream that ripped from his throat as he fired every which way, covering every scrap of blue that he saw. The ink in the reservoir on his back ran dry, but he was beyond noting it. He went on in a blind rage, like one of the berserking Krakens of old.

And as for the sniper, he played his part perfectly, picking off every ripple in blue that was being forced farther and farther back as the last seconds dwindled.

_Three. Two. One._

_'WONG! WON-WONG!_ '

When time was called, not a soul in blue was moving. Gelert himself only stopped when a well-aimed shot splattered green at his feet. He stopped, rigid, right where he stood – and shook all over.

* * *

The Judge had eyes that could gut you right through like a barbed hook, then look at you as if it were  _your_  fault that you had bled out such a mess. Gelert had felt his insides squirm whenever the teams who had played in one of the professional matches beamed onto the great monitor in Inkopolis square came to present themselves before the creature, which for the way it apparently thought of every squid as Gelert thought of a slime-mould, may as well have been a little god. It was a funny sort of god, thought, Gelert, who had rolls of fat around its neck.

It did not stop the deep-grained urge to bow to the fat little deity, though, which was like an itch at the nape of his neck. There were some habits that just took time to break.

'Well?' demanded the Octoling, with about three too many vowels. 'The verdict? It is to whom?'

The Octoling had somehow contrived to place herself between the sniper and Gelert as the teams were lining up before the cushioned dais the Judge's handlers had borne up to the field, breaking with what even Gelert knew was iron tradition, if not principle – teams were supposed to stand  _together_. The furious look that their own captain threw at her, from the far end of the lineup, was nearly as cutting as the eye of complete indifference, yet utter scorn that swept over Gelert as the Judge turned toward her.

'Wong,' said the Judge, gesturing with one long, distended claw. It was pointed at Gelert.

'What?' said the Octoling and the captain at nearly the same instant.

'Me…?' said Gelert, blinking. His legs suddenly did not want to hold their tone beneath him. He wobbled.

'Steady,' said the sniper, laying a hand on him to do just that. 'Told you, son. You got bones; I know a backliner when I see one. And sometimes a backliner has to be a frontliner, too.'

'I want a recount!' Gelert thought that it was the Octoling who had spoken – but it was the captain! She had pushed out in front of the line and threw the little Judge into a long shadow of the setting sun. 'There's no way a play like  _that_  stunt stole the game!'

' _Grrrfft!_ ' snarled the Judge, flashing  _all_  of his long, yellowed, and very,  _very_  sharp teeth. The captain flinched back. Then the Judge shook his head, slow and grave. 'Wong. Wong  _wong_.' No, there had been no mistake. There  _could_  be no mistake. The Judge glowered at the captain out of the caves of puffy fat and fur around his yellow eyes; she seemed to wither in an instant like dulse on the blacktop.

'But… but…' the captain stammered, clenching and unclenching her hands. Then she whirled around on Gelert, and her eyes were dark and wild.

'What do you take me for?' There was something like a glimpse of a knife under the lamplight in the low tones of the captain's voice. It made Gelert cold. 'Do you think I am a fool?' she went on, thrusting a digit into Gelert's neck.

'Hey, he won for you, didn't he?' said the nut-brown boy of the blue team, looking lost and not a little uncomfortable at this turn of events. 'What's the deal?'

He might have been a car in the street below for all the attention the captain paid him. 'Do you still want to play like you're nothing but a minnow turfer? When there are Inklings in this town who gave up  _everything_  to be fresh? Do you have  _any_  idea how hard I've had to work to make a name for myself in this town? And then  _you_  come, dressed in those stale,  _rotten_  clothes…!'

'Hey,' said the captain's mate, warningly. 'Easy.' But she ignored him, too.

'And  _you_ ,' the captain said, rounding now upon the sniper, 'don't think you're off the hook! What are you – pro? Trainer? League Coach? Does it foam you up to make bait out of the amateur leagues? How long have you and he been working on your sick joke? And  _enough_  of the chum-chewing grin!'

The sniper just smiled broader than ever. 'Nothing gets past you, does it, sir?' he said with an easy shrug of his shoulders.

'I  _knew_  it!' shrieked the captain in bitter triumph. She turned her back on him, then spat a gob of blackish ink onto Gelert's brown, pointed shoes. He stared at it, unable even to think of a response.

'What did I do?' he whispered, feeling empty as could be. 'What could I have done differently?' He said it so quietly that it should have gone no further than his own ears. The Octoling heard it nonetheless; she jolted as if galvanized and stared at the boy beside her, who (it was becoming hard for anyone to ignore it) was probably one more cruel question away from tears.

'I,' announced the captain, with enormous, wounded dignity. 'Have had enough. I hope that you both feel fresh and proud of yourselves. As for me, I,' she snorted, hoisting her arm onto her shoulders, 'am leaving.' She began to stomp off, shoulders set, then stopped, casting a scornful glance behind her.

'Coming?' she said, testily.

'I think,' replied the captain's mate, 'that you and I need to have a talk later.' The captain's beak gawped open for a moment. Then, just as unexpected, the captain's mate put out his hand to Gelert. He flashed a thin smile.

'Good turfing out there, Wommly. And, er… sorry about what I said during the match. Sometimes… um… sometimes people rub off on you. Even when they probably shouldn't. Saler Takoya. Er… my name. Sal or Saler will do. Sorry,' said the boy with a laugh that did nothing to hide his nerves. 'I was never very good at introductions.'

'And I am called Piev!' warbled the Octoling, grasping Gelert's off-arm and pumping it with a violent friendliness. 'It is not often that I am bested. How much a thrill to be splatted in Inkopolis!' And she beamed her wrong beak-points at Gelert in a huge smile. Oddly enough, he did not nearly feel like running.

'Well, when among Salmonids…' the sniper muttered. He did not put out his hand, but pointed at the tags depending from his neck instead. 'Captain Tyros Mirador. Of the Ninety-sixth Coastal Reserve. Charmed, I'm sure. I'd say, son, we've got more than two scales toward a team here between the four of us. What do you say?'

'It is okay?' said the Octoling, suddenly remembering her old teammates. The nut-brown boy just shrugged.

'Hey, it's free play. Do what you like.'

'If you ever feel up for it,' said the blue charger, 'you're welcome to play with us anytime. You were great.'

'Umm… ditto,' said the timid blue inker, seated on his upturned bucket. Even though they had lost, Gelert saw that all of them were smiling.

'Thousand thanks!' the Octoling cheered. Gelert thought that his arm might turn to jelly. He looked around at all the other three, head in a whirl. Beyond them all, the captain stood, dark and glowering. She seemed much taller than she really was for an instant, like a black thunderhead obscuring the sunset. Gelert swallowed and cast a pleading glance at the Judge.

'Wong.' And that was all that he said, though it did not sound unkind. Of course – it was not in his line to judge such things. But at least  _he_  would not care about the outcome. He would be the same curmudgeonly little god, no matter what. It was nevertheless, however strangely, a comfort.

Gelert smiled. It was strange and uneasy like a rubber band stretched too taut, or of a man who has forgotten how to be really happy for a long, weary while. He grasped the hand that the other boy had put out (the other was still in the grip of an enthusiastic, and very foreign Octoling). Saler. Piev. And the Captain. He tasted their names, savouring the warm, fresh pleasure it brought. A team?

Well, why not?

'I am Gelert,' he said. Then, after a pause that was only a little too long, he added, 'I am happy to meet you all.'

'And  _I_ ,' said the captain, 'am Rita del Mare. And I swear that you all  _will_  hear my name again. You  _turncoats_ ,' she snarled. 'I swear, by my own name, I am going to make my name in this town, without  _you_!'

'No, you, sir,' said the Captain – the  _real_  Captain, with the same grin that never faded, 'are an ass.'


	2. Ink, Wine, and Song

            ‘Alright, ladies,’ said the Captain, turning his sunglasses on them all from over his folded digits. The greasy yellow lamps and their refracting glint through panes of green glass lanterns, rather badly in need of a dusting and suspended from the black iron grates in the ceiling, danced on the mirrored lenses and made him seem less like an Inkling and far more like a spider than anyone felt quite comfortable with. ‘If this team is going to function, we need to lay down the Rules, here and now. Rule One–’

            ‘A little question,’ said Piev, breaking in with an innocent wrong-beaked smile. ‘You have promised supper, yes? We may order, no?’

            By the time the sniper’s perpetual grin had soured to a blank annoyance, Saler had added, ‘I… er… My allowance just came in, so I’m good for the money. I’ll pick up the tab, if you like.’ Gelert thought that the other boy regretted it the instant he had made the offer, as the expression of tamped-down alarm seemed to stretch more taut as he cast a look around the dingy warehouse by the docks that had been converted into a restaurant (of sorts). Whether it was because it was outside of the ring of hostels around Inkopolis Square, or because of the rough and barnacled clientele at low booths in dim corners talking over chipped mugs of coffee or tall, thin tumblers of something red that might have been wine, or cavorting with a kind of lady that the old squids had always warned him against at barworn tables out in the open, he began to audibly gulp air across his membrane, as if he had just chosen the worst possible instant to realize just what sort of place they had walked willingly into.

            ‘That’s a good rookie!’ said the sniper warmly. ‘And if you’re hungry, you’re not going to find anywhere more middling than here. It’s rather amazing, actually. By all means, call the _garçon_! And then–’

            ‘Excuse me,’ said Gelert, carefully and as calmly as he could manage, which after the events of the last hour and where they had carried him was still not wholly successful, ‘but what in the world are we doing here?’

            ‘Isn’t it obvious, son?’

            ‘No,’ said Gelert. ‘It really isn’t.’

            Gelert felt the mirrored lenses looking him over, turning him this way and that like a gun half-torn to pieces to get a look at the works. Then, suddenly, the sniper heaved a burbling sigh and lifted his hands, removing the mirrored lenses from off his face. The other three at the low table started when he turned his left eye around on them all – for while the right was a light teal, and unremarkable but for the weary line around it, the other, the left–

            It was a monstrosity. Gogging, milky-white, with thin yellow veins and a side-slit pupil that looked nauseatingly blind even when it swiveled to face each of them in turn. The membrane around it puckered and peeled back from the edges, showing a grey-green mass underneath where the ink in contact with the white, blind, staring _thing_ had gone thick, briny, and dead.

            The Captain closed his good eye. The awful left never even blinked. Mercifully, the Captain’s glasses were replaced.

            No one said a word.

            ‘Can’t exactly go to war with one good eye, can I?’ said the sniper, talking as if to someone in the far distance. ‘Had to find other work. Call it a business proposition, if you like. I suppose,’ said the Captain, flashing the familiar grin now that he was back behind his lenses, ‘you’d all like some food after the game. Well, don’t let me stop you. I’ll set it all down for you meanwhile, black and white.’

            ‘You are not hungry?’ said Piev, who had rebounded more quickly than the rest.

            ‘Not the sort of thing I eat,’ the sniper replied with a snort. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the raised dais against the far wall of the old warehouse. ‘We’re here for other reasons.’

            ‘Then I,’ said Piev, in reverent tones as she consulted the menu, ‘will take the Bouillabaisse.’

            ‘I don’t think I have much of an appetite,’ mumbled Saler.

            Neither did Gelert.

            There was another long pause broken only by the rough voices of huge men of the lower orders, most covered in barnacles, talking in their throaty groaning voices that seemed to echo off the corrugated metal walls. Gelert wondered how they got on with one another when everything they said sounded like a threat. Finally, after Piev had waved down a waiter, the Captain spoke again:

            ‘You all know Mr. Grizz?’

Three blank masks blinked back at him.

‘No? You know GrizzCo, either? Not even that? Great bumping congers, don’t you paint-swodges read the papers anymore these days, or do you let the glammed-up idols tell you all about what the world out there is like, too?’

            ‘Wait…’ said Saler, looking for the moment more thoughtful than queasy. ‘I think I have heard that name. My folks have the ticker feed from the Reef going on the wall screens in the mornings when we eat together. Didn’t they just go public at… er… twenty aurum a share? My uncle even remarked that it was strange – oh! Now I _do_ remember. They just incorporated a month ago, too, right? “Awfully fast to go from start-up to trading twenty gold pieces for a clam.” Those were his exact words.’ Saler paused, looking around at the other three, who were all regarding him more or less blankly. The Captain’s face in particular was hotly, intensely, aggressively blank. ‘Er… that’s their logo, too, isn’t it? Your hat – I mean, on your hat?’ Another pause. ‘You don’t mean that _you’re_ the C.E.O. of GrizzCo–!’

            ‘You’re got a squelcher’s head,’ the Captain snapped. ‘You know what kind of squid your mark is when you go after him. You have to, else you get cut down if you screw up when you put a gun to his head. Do I look like the type?’

            You could see the hot convection currents of embarrassment billowing under the boy’s membrane in the lurid green light if you squinted. ‘Sorry…! It was a stupid thought. I just thought, since you mentioned it… well, I know that’s their logo…’

            ‘It’s always worse to jump to conclusions about your friends,’ said the Captain, back to his jocular, singsong tones. ‘Least you always know going in your enemy is going to be shooting at you. No, boy. I’m not Mr. Grizz. I’m not half good enough for that.’

            ‘This Mister Grizz,’ pondered Piev, chewing the long vowels with a long blissful expiration over the rough earthen cocotte filled with a red modge of whitefish in an iridescent grunge of salad oil which had just been brought from the kitchen. And after the smell had wafted over to him, Gelert had to wonder honestly just what the fuss was about: Mommaw Carpacci always tipped things that turned out of the kitchens like _that_ into the lobster beds. ‘He is a good man? I should like to meet him, I think.’

            ‘I can make it happen, little lady,’ said the Captain, leaning back in his chair. ‘You all make a name for yourselves in this town, I guarantee Mr. Grizz will be very interested in a word with all of you.’

            Gelert spoke the question he though – surely – must have been beginning to bite at all of them. ‘Why?’

            ‘Couldn’t tell you everything that goes on in that big brain, son. I’m just the go-between. All I can say is that Mr. Grizz wants a better world and a better Inkopolis than the one we’ve got, ‘specially for ink-gobs like you and me that no matter what we do, in the end, somebody just ain’t gonna like. But he needs talent to make it happen. That’s where I come in.’

            ‘I’ve never thought Inkopolis was so bad…’ Saler said, looking at the perplexity on his own mask in the sniper’s mirrored lenses.

            ‘Yeah?’ said the Captain. ‘Try reading the papers sometime. Your Inkopolis now isn’t anything like it was sixty, seventy years ago. Back, then, this city knew how to live with itself. You didn’t have a wall up between your age and mine. You didn’t go drooling after whatever was freshest every five minutes. And you didn’t have to get your news from the trumped-up songbird of the week, either. Now–’ the Captain rapped his hand on the rough tabletop. ‘As I was saying, Rule One: You obey your Captain’s orders, first time, no questions, no matter what. It’s simple, so here’s a quiz: shut your mouths, you little todarodes, and have a taste of something your ears will beat your brains out to get another plate of.’

            Behind the sniper, a small figure had mounted the dais and taken her position behind a thick brass wedge of a microphone. She was an Inkling, and that much was obvious: but it was everything else that grabbed your attention and held it like a lobster’s claw the moment you laid eyes on her. She wore a tight-fit dress in fine gold sequins that shone somehow brighter in the grunge lit up by the greenglass lamps, like a candle flame in a room lit by the dawning twilight. A pair of yellow sealskin opera gloves that went up to her shoulders clung to her arms, and a huge number of herringbone rings, fine like filaments, wreathed her delicate digitopodes, with earrings to match. Upon her legs were high stockings, bone white, which looked everything like real silkweed. The flesh of her mantle was done up in one smooth sheet that flowed softly down her back and thin shoulders like a watercourse, and covered her right eye like a wink. Her right eye was wide and just a trifle lazy, magnified by – of all things – a monocle on a gold chain. She smiled at the room and cleared her throat. It was a delicate sound, but the microphone took it, threw it outward, and a hush spread at once through the briny mass.

            ‘Thank you all for coming tonight,’ she said in a high, throaty voice that was half-whisper. ‘And especially _you_ out there. You know who you are. And I have to say, it means the world to me. This is for you.’ And she spread her hands and began to sing.

            Gelert had what he thought must be the shock of his life.

            ‘I…’ he stammered. ‘I know that song. I… I remember when I heard it in the hatching-cradle. The old squids used to sing it to the hatchlings when they fussed. Mommaw Carpacci sang it when she washed bones for soup. I didn’t think anyone in Inkopolis knew it.’

            ‘I thought you might,’ said the Captain. A smile quite unlike his usual grin had settled onto his features. You could tell, even without seeing behind his lenses, that he had closed his eyes in rare contentment. ‘You’ve got a memory, son. Unlike the rest of this city.’

            ‘Wow,’ said Saler, a bibulous grin spreading over his face. A hot flush put the bowl of flat tentacles over his upper membrane into dreamy, dancing movement.

            ‘Mmmm…!’ Piev said, eyes on her soup.

 

_The breeze blows the ash_

_And below, a silver flash_

_Crashing through the still water_

_Ripples flow_

_Yet you know_

_The hook, it waits for you_

_Hush, my love_

_And listen, listen, listen_

_For the way to light_

_And the road to life_

_Are not for all those_

_Who doze_

_And shine their glittering scales_

_Time has come_

_The hour is now_

_For the dance of the young and the loved_

_Ripples flow_

_Yet you know_

_The hook, it waits for you_

_Hush, my love_

_And listen, listen, listen_

_For the way to love_

_And the path to my heart_

_Are not for all those_

_Who doze_

_And shine their glistening scales_

_But when we dance_

_And comes our chance_

_The hook, it takes us both_

_Ripples flow_

_Yet you know_

_The hook, it waits for you_

_The hook, it waits for me_

_Darling let it be_

            There was applause like an artillery battery. The Inkling, who Gelert realized was beautiful in a strange, liquid way that made him feel as if he had swallowed warm oil, smiled out over her audience howling its approval.

            ‘Thank you. You are all so kind,’ she piped, adjusting her monocle. ‘I cannot express what you all mean to me. This next song is for all Inkopolis has done for me…’

            ‘We love you, Doray!’ a moray’s rasping voice slurred from somewhere in the crowd. Blows rained down upon him to shut his mouth – but no one thought to contradict him, either.

            ‘I love you, too,’ the singer replied with a wave of her wrist. ‘I hope you all know this one.’

            ‘Aaaah!’ Piev ejaculated, surging to her feet as a tune that began to rise up all around them, starting from the dais, slow and soft at first, then growing to a din of untrained and coarse voices all giving full throat to a hearty Calamari Inkantation. ‘It is _the_ song! I, I too know this one!’ And the Octoling added her warbling voice to the male chorus, riding over the bass and baritone and harmonizing with the high and breathy soprano of the Inkling onstage. The Octoling caught the eye of the singer, who waved, and the two began to weave their melody together, one over the top of the other. The singer, Doray, began to clap her dainty hands, and her audience followed suit – only occasionally in time. Even Saler found himself joining in with the words that _every_ Inkling knew, more or less automatically, and without zest. Only the Captain and Gelert kept themselves from joining in. Gelert thought of the old squids, especially Mommaw Carpacci, and of all the other mouths that the farm had to feed, and how no one, not even those he had hatched alongside, had wanted to look at him when he drew the short lot to leave; and he found when he looked inside, there just wasn’t any Inkantation there to sing. Not right now.

            The sniper was another story. Gelert looked at him to try to forget himself. It was strange: even with the contented smile on his face, it was somehow impossible to imagine the creature behind the lenses as adding his voice to a song – any song. It was like trying to think of a square circle, or Inkopolis without its turf wars. He wasn’t the sort of thing that sang. It was, in a way, a perversely comforting thought.

            The Inkantation was soon over, as all songs, and the crowd began to slowly slump back into its seats, sapped and happy and placid. The singer smiled and launched into a low, blue, wordless tune; but it was clear that the moment had passed, and the crowd began to take up its gravelly, throaty grumble again with a clean conscience. Though it was a happier grumble.

            ‘Haaaa-h!’ sighed Piev, sinking back into her chair with a frisson of pure pleasure. ‘It has been a long time since I have heard _the_ song. What joy to hear it in Inkopolis!’

            ‘Yeah…’ said Saler, slouching low in a liquid slump, with an altogether different sort of sigh. ‘That was great.’

            ‘Thought you might enjoy that,’ said the Captain. ‘You lot sometimes forget that there was a whole world that came before your mothers had a thought of spawning you. But we old folks still remember. And I don’t know a soul who’s tasted the old wine and then ever said the new was better.’

            ‘I, for one, am for it!’ said Piev, trailing a digitopode lovingly through the last oily dregs of perfectly middling Bouillabaisse. ‘I had not known such things were in Inkopolis. I have known only what I have seen since I did come here, and that has been so marvelous that I cannot express. The end, it is that there is so much more of Inkopolis to come to know!’ The Octoling said it with such a simple faith, such a perfect happiness, like that of a child given its favourite ice cream on a hot summer’s day, that Gelert found himself wondering something that he almost dared not think. He said instead:

            ‘When was it that you came to Inkopolis?’

            ‘Oh,’ Piev replied, undulating her arm in a vague, boneless way, ‘it is not for a long time. I found your language difficult at the first, so I did not think to count the days. It was a distraction to me just to understand! But I do not think it could be more than twenty or that-and-two sundowns since I have come.’

            That was almost exactly when Gelert had arrived. How had she _done_ it?

The old squids’ words came whispering back: ‘brains right down into their arms.’ He had never known just what it must mean until now. He felt stupid and slow comparing himself to _that_.

And then there was still the question that nipped at him, and a growing suspicion he did not want to give assent to. He said instead:

            ‘But… where are you staying? I haven’t seen you at any of the hostels.’

            ‘Ah!’ Piev exclaimed with a broad grin. ‘I have made my little house under the Sturgeon Bridge! In that, I can place all of the beautiful things I have found in Inkopolis, and I have made a friend of the constables who come to make peace.’

            ‘But… that’s insane! _And_ dangerous!’ Saler said, jolted back to the ground. He looked at the Octoling girl with horror on his mask. ‘What if someone came along to hurt you? That’s a…’ He swallowed. ‘It’s a really bad part of town. At night. Like…’ His voice dropped, and his hands began to tremble. ‘Like now? Like… here?’

            ‘None of worry!’ the Octoling said, beaming a beaky smile. ‘I still have my tanks of experiments, and it is enough. The space, it is also necessary. Just because I am in Inkopolis, that is no excuse to slack from work, yes?’

            ‘I… er… well… I… I suppose?’ said Saler, whose digitopodes seemed to be trying to shake themselves in knots. He looked about as confused and uncomfortable as a squid could be. Gelert felt sorry for him – so sorry, in fact, that he found himself asking the question that he dared not ask, just to rescue the poor boy from his own awkward work:

            ‘How old are you?’

            The Captain gawped. ‘How old…! Son, there’s some things you just don’t ask!’

            ‘It is alright!’ Piev said. She paused, focusing her eyes distantly for a moment, as if lost deep in thought. ‘It is difficult to remember the earliest of our days. I have only ever seen the records kept by the computers, and we know that they lie to us when it seems good. And it is not the same underground, where there are only screens to show us the lie that seems good, and clocks that say nothing and are worse than lies. Finally, I must guess, for I am not sure. But I think that I must have six whole years, but not very much more.’

            ‘Six…!’ gasped the sniper. He looked at her with a blank expression that might have been pity.

            ‘Six…?’ murmured Gelert. He thought of the hatchlings as they watched him go. Some of _them_ were that age. He felt smaller, and stupider, and more useless than ever.

            ‘You’re only… but… but that’s my sister’s… and she’s only…!’ Saler stammered, staring at the Octoling with disbelief, intimidation, and something like awe flickering across his face by turns.

            Piev looked around at them all, her smile fading slowly. ‘It is not alright?’ she asked.

            The sniper coughed. ‘What you are, little lady, and where you came from, that’s your business. You don’t want or need any help to keep your suckers safe, that’s just fine by me. I like a teammate who can take care of herself.’ The sniper scowled.

‘Now listen, you little inkstains,’ the Captain said in a hard voice. ‘There’s a fast-track tournament starting tomorrow to chute four Turf teams straight to the Pro Leagues. You win that, I guarantee, Mr. Grizz is bound to notice. Games start at 1700 sharp at the Tower. Meet up at 1600 at the shooting range in the Square. It’ll be enough time to drill you – not into anything spectacular, but we’re not looking for that right now. We just have to see you get through the slush-teams first.’ The Captain flashed a plastic grin. ‘And don’t you drip all over the floor worrying about it shaking out. Trust an old soldier. We’ll get through alright. I’ll shoot a way through myself, if I have to.’

            ‘And you,’ the sniper went on, pointing a clawed thumb at Gelert. ‘Where are _you_ staying?’

            ‘At the hostel by the Metroline,’ Gelert answered, blinking.

            ‘No, you’re not. You’re going with him.’ The sniper jerked his thumb at Saler, who jumped in his seat.

            ‘But I haven’t let anyone…!’

            ‘You’ve got more than just your parents living with you, yeah?’ said the Captain. ‘And you’ve got a head for business. Means money. Together that means a big house. You’ve got the rooms to spare. Am I wrong, boy?’

            ‘Well, no, but…’ Saler wrung his hands and turned to face Gelert. ‘You sure you want to come stay with me, Wommly? Even after I said what I said today?’

            Gelert stared for a moment at the pinched expression on the other boy’s face. Then he nodded his head, slowly. By the Lord of the Air – what else could he do?

            ‘Alright…’ Saler sighed, as if relieved. ‘I’ll… I’m sure I’ll think of something to tell my folks on the way.’ The other boy flashed a smile that was as thin as a fishbone. ‘You’re pretty fresh, Wommly, you know that?’

            ‘And clear out your schedule for tomorrow,’ said the Captain, standing. ‘You’re going to spend the day with this one.

            ‘But, I can’t… not _all_ day!’ Saler protested. ‘My uncle is training me to work at the Reef – you know, day trading.’

            ‘Then _he_ –’ Gelert felt the Captain’s eyes boring a hole into him from behind his lenses. ‘Goes with you. No back-talk! You’re a front-gunner. He’s a backliner. You two have got to know each other so well that you’d drink each other’s spit if you had to. That’s what a team that works _has_ to be, and we don’t have a lot of time to get there. Am I coming through clear, son? Remember Rule One?’

            Saler hung his head. ‘Yes, sir.’

            ‘I have another little question,’ Piev said, raising her hand tentatively. ‘You have said Rule One. What is Rule Two?’

            ‘There is no Rule Two.’ The sniper turned his back on them all. ‘Now, go on. Get! I have some business I need to take care of here. Let the little lady walk you two home.’

            ‘With pleasure, sir!’ Piev said, getting into the spirit of the moment by throwing her arms around the two boys in a crushing sidelong hug.

            ‘Hey, hey, easy…!’ Saler gasped as his insides jostled wildly inside his membrane. ‘You’re a whole lot stronger than my sister…!’

            But Gelert thought it really wasn’t half-bad.

            As they were leaving, Gelert threw a glance back over his shoulder. He saw the Captain disappear into a door at the back of the dais where the singer had quietly retired after her set. But Gelert only had time enough for one quick, jealous pang toward the sniper before he and Saler were swept bodily out into the muggy night by an Octoling just following orders.


	3. Bleak House

Saler's family lived northward, he told Piev and Gelert as they shuffled, all but running back to the safe, bright lights of the Square from the dinge and threatening alleyways clustered near the docks that seemed to be ten times more in the dark than seemed possible in the daylight. They chose it, he explained with bubbling voice as he tried to engulf enough air to keep pace, to be near the homes that his father oversaw, which was really only a sideline. His uncle, who really owned the house, instead went into the Business District, every day, where he kept up a small office within two blocks of the Reef Exchange. It was really only large enough for a big barquewood desk – that one was his uncle's – and a clerk's knee desk, which Saler got to use whenever his uncle brought him along. But that was alright, because they were hardly ever there anyway, and the  _real_  action was always out on the floor, or in one of the coralstone side-rooms that the Reef let for meetings. It could get pretty hairy in there, and Saler himself had even seen…

Gelert and Piev exchanged a glance and just let him talk. If there was ever an Inkling who was both frightened and winded out of his wits, it was Saler Takoya. It seemed the kindest thing to leave him alone.

('Imagine being affrighted at a place like that!' Piev whispered, not unsympathetic as she and Gelert kept up an easy lope. Neither was anything like winded. 'What a funny Inkling!')

They passed no one at all save a tall, painfully thin urchin trudging rather numbly in the opposite way, who carried a canvas sack on his back too large for his gangling body, and which seemed to tremble of itself. But he paid them no mind except to blink at them out of one peering, judging eye as they passed under the wan yellow lamps of the district. Saler quickened his pace to a run as they passed by; Piev just smiled and waved.

When they had come once again under the sleepless blare that was Inkopolis Square, Saler doubled himself over a table behind the food truck that served ridiculous oily sandwiches – and promptly collapsed into a dripping, bilious-yellow half-squid, too exhausted and winded to keep himself in quite one form or another. White foam bubbled over his membrane where it was exposed under his shirt with every sucking gulp for air.

'Saler!' Gelert half-shouted. He put out his hand to lay it on the other boy's shoulder, but drew it back at the last instant. He swallowed. 'Are you alright?'

The supine boy just groaned, low and long.

'Hey, calmarades,' said the proprietor of the food truck, poking his red head out for a look around. 'Everything alright out there?'

'All goes well!' Piev called back with a wave and a broad, beaky grin. 'It is nothing but a little case of hypopneumastis. He will be healed by himself very soon.'

'Oh.' The proprietor's red antennae twitched at the three, as if he was uncertain whether he really ought to be reassured. 'You a nurse, missy?'

'Not at all!' Piev said brightly. 'But I know the Inkling physiology very well. Down to the bottom! I have done much work in it.'

'That's… good.' The proprietor said nothing and squinted for a long moment. 'Well, I've got a phone if you need to call somebody. Okay?'

' _Is_  he really alright?' Gelert whispered after the proprietor had shut the door and disappeared from view.

'It is well sure! The Inkling, he is made to use first the gases dissolved in his own strength when a stress presses on him. It is so he may inflame himself and burn up the oil he keeps for when he is hungry, so that he can fly the shark and the Octarian who chase him. But so it is that mucinoid filaments are made rigid without the gases in the Inkling exocytem which give him his tone. Our friend had such stress already, and then we ran, and it was too much for him to port. You understand, yes?'

Gelert nodded his head, slowly, hoping that his bewilderment did not show upon his face too plainly. Saler emitted a sort of high-pitched gurgle.

'You see? He is repairing,' Piev said, pointing in evident satisfaction. Sure enough, the drooping arms and limp legs began to shorten, and the exposed membrane gradually began to lose the sickly colour of bile and chrome back to its usual olive hues. When he was more or less proportioned as an Inkling ought to be, Saler raised his hand, a little feebly. His eyes were slightly sunken into his black mask, and he avoided the gaze of the other two – Gelert in particular.

'I… er… sorry,' Saler said. He sounded too exhausted to even be really embarrassed. "I'll call my folks and tell them to send someone down to the Square to pick us up. But… ah… my uncle doesn't hold with cell tech. I don't suppose you…'

Gelert shook his head. 'Sorry, Saler…' he muttered. 'Neither did the old squids.'

'Ah… I should have figured. That was dumb of me,' said Saler, sounding about as low as a squid could be.

'The owner of the food truck did say we could use his,' Gelert said, with the nervous rising intonation of trying to make-right.

'Did he?' Saler said with a thin, exhausted smile. 'Good old Sean. Could you… I hate to ask… could you be a pal and bring it here, Wommly? I'd get up myself, but… no, never mind. I'll be alright, I think…'

'Never in my life!' Piev warbled, forcing the boy back into his chair. 'Rest, you!' Saler threw her a grateful, if slightly scandalized look.

'I'll do it,' Gelert said, knocking on the back door of the food truck a few moments later. It swung open instantly, the proprietor already extending a triangular block of a phone in a thick red pincer.

'I thought I had better have this ready in case you all might need it,' he said, looking over Gelert's astonishment. 'Password is "crusty". Just give it back when you've all done what you need to. I'd rather see you all leaving here with somewhere to go. Okay? And, here–' The proprietor dropped the phone into Gelert's unprotesting hands and ducked for a moment into the truck. When he reappeared, he held two paper boats, each containing its own greasy, preposterous tower of a sandwich staining the bottom.

'One for you, and one for him,' the proprietor explained. 'Growing Inklings need to eat: they shouldn't go collapsing outside my truck. And you, you look like you haven't had something like this for a while. No, you don't need to say anything – that look tells me all I need to know. You just knock again when you're done.'

'Thank you,' said Gelert, too taken aback to say anything else.

Saler accepted both the phone and the greasy sandwich with a look that was pitiably grateful. He devoured the latter with huge, wolfing bites that made Gelert realize just how badly he must have needed the oil after the evening so far. Gelert knew that he, too, must also be depleted of his dispensable ink – but he still could not force himself to finish more than a third of his own. It made him miss Mommaw Carpacci too much.

When Saler had finished, he could not quite meet Gelert's eye. The fleshy bowl of his upper tentacles curled as if from shame that one is better off saying nothing about.

'I'll… call my uncle, Wommly. He'll send someone to pick us up here. My folks are probably expecting me, so it… it shouldn't be long.' Saler took the proprietor's phone and plodded, heavily, off to a quieter corner of the Square. The other end picked up quickly, and although Saler kept his voice whisperingly low and apologetic, he kept having to raise it by turns so that Gelert occasionally caught the occasional one-sided snatch of the conversation:

'He wants to see me? Now?'

'No, I swear, I haven't been… the games ran late, and…'

A longer pause.

'No, she left… I met some new friends, I think… tell Uncle one of them wants to…'

There was an anxious silence.

'...yeah, a new team, too… no, tell him it doesn't have a name yet…'

'…as a pageboy at the Reef? …put in a word with Uncle before we get there?'

Saler gave a sigh that was not quite one of relief.

'Alright, thanks…'

Saler returned with a smile on his face like a distorted geometric figure. 'Got it done, Wommly! My aunt is sending out one of the cars. It will be here in about ten minutes.'

Gelert nodded his head, numbly.  _One_  of the cars?

'Oh, and, er…' Saler mumbled. 'My uncle will want to see you tonight, after we get to my folks' place. And he… er… if he sees you dressed like that – and don't get me wrong, I think it's fresh as fins! But I had to tell him that you wanted to be a pageboy, and… we've got to get you some new clothes, Wommly. That's… that's how it is.'

Gelert felt the ground opening under him.

'It's just that my Uncle is a huge fan of turfing,' Saler went on, seeing the alarm growing on the face of the other Inkling boy. 'He'll be thinking that you're one of the kids on the squads I played with, and it's just that he gets ideas in his head of what turf kids are like… and, er, we're going to have to play that up if we're going to follow the Captain's orders. And… and that's how it is.'

Gelert's hands balled into fists.

'No,' he said, soft as a breath. 'That's  _not_  how it is.' But Saler's nerves just kept prattling, and Gelert went unheard.

'Mister Gelert?' Piev said, trying her very hardest not to interrupt. 'I have many experiments which need me, their mother, and it must be that I go. But it is I think a good thing to change one's clothes, yes? It is one of the best parts of the life of Inkopolis, no?'

 _No_ , Gelert thought acidly. It really wasn't.

 

* * *

 

Gelert groaned when he saw where Saler Takoya must live. He had had a notion from how the boy had been acting, but one look at the chalk-white villa on the hill which was near-gleaming in the day-glow of the salt lamps lighting its high façade from below, at the four pearly cars bunched like coral in the front drive, and at the rubbish bins on the curb full of what he knew, without looking, must be enough food for the old squids to have made into a festival meal to feed the hatchlings for a week, with enough left over for themselves – with one look, he knew, with a dull ache that was almost anger, that Saler's family was what Ompa Diu called  _city people_.

'You watch your back around them,' the old squid would say, shooting sidelong glances at the tourists who came down from Inkopolis to the village on Market Day to buy farmwares and snap pictures on their phones – mostly the latter. 'Anyone who can forget where his food comes from is bound to go wrong other places, too. City people don't think like you and me.'

Gelert had always thought it was strange, though, that Ompa Diu was happy enough to put on a smile to sell cut-rate roe to those same people, who always only ever bought a tiny tin, which was nothing like enough to even let you know you'd eaten after a hard day trawling nets. And now, now that he had seen Inkopolis for himself, Gelert began to understand why.

A tiny, crisp voice clearing its throat brought him back to the present. 'Will the young master's guest kindly care to come inside?' said the orange, eyeless sea cucumber from somewhere around Gelert's shins. (Just how that creature had managed to drive them through the thronging streets and crosswalks of an Inkopolis just waking up for the night, Gelert did not now want to contemplate.)

'You okay, Wommly?' said Saler, laying a hand on Gelert's shoulder. Geler thought he must be trying to be kind. 'You look a little spooked.'

'I am all right,' Gelert said, even though this was Inkopolis, and he was anything but. He wrenched his shoulder away. Saler looked a little hurt.

' _Do_  enter then, please, and be timely,' said the small voice of the cumber. 'This is not ordinarily a night on which the family entertains.' And with one long, boneless proboscis, the cumber threw open the tall red double-doors of the entryway, without a hint of effort. And once it had opened, a small, dripping-yellow something hurled itself out of the aperture and onto Saler, clinging to the front of the boy's shirt.

'Sal!' it – or, rather unmistakably,  _she_  – squealed. 'Bruh-bruh! Missed you!'

'Easy, Io, easy!' said Saler, peeling the (very) young Inkling girl off of his shirt and holding her at arm's length with what was plainly a great deal of practice. 'Remember what Auntie said? That you're getting too big to jump on bruh-bruh Sal?'

'But that's what you do when you miss somebody!' said the little Inkling girl, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

'And  _where_  are your clothes, girl?' said the cumber, fussing her feathery protuberances like a queer moustache at the girl even as she made a grab at her.

'Dunno!' the girl squealed, oozing herself right out of the cumber's grasp. 'Forgot!' she said, flailing all of her arms, which were one and all too young to have budded out into digits. She rolled laughing upon the ground for a brief moment, then stopped in an instant and blinked her big, wide eyes at Gelert. 'Hey, bruh-bruh. Who's he?'

She could have been any one of the little squidlings back on the farm, Gelert realized with a start. More of them, as young or even younger than she, were coming to the farm every day. They all, one and all, had the same laughing look of wide-eyed wonder on their masks. She blinked at him as if he was a puzzle with a piece cut out and gone missing.

'What are you  _wearing_?' she said, in the half-disgusted, querying tones of habit of the very young, in whom habit has become conviction.

'It's called a jerkin,' Gelert explained kindly. 'We wear it on the farm because it keeps the sun off, and it's tough enough to work in when you're handling hooks and nets. And it still leaves your arms free in case you have to half-squid yourself to get a job done.'

'That's  _weird_ ,' the girl said, with as firm a decision as if she had been the Judge himself.

'You incorrigible child!' the cumber tutted, making another grab at the girl. This time was more successful than the last, and the cumber held the giggling, wriggling, squealing drip of a squidling high over the ground so that she would be less inclined to wriggle free. 'I shall see your father about this, and make no mistake! I declare, child, you make my organs go greyer every day!'

The little squidling just laughed the louder. The two boys and the cumber stepped inside, and Saler shut the door behind them.

'Sorry about Miss Marrows, Wommly,' he said when the cumber had gone up the grand, pink-dappled staircase in the foyer by leaps that such a creature really ought not be capable of, and was safely out of earshot. 'She's always been like that, so long as I can remember. We're all just used to her, I guess. She's really not so bad if she lets you get down below the prickles. And… er… sorry about Io, too. My sister, I mean. She's still young, and we keep trying to teach her what you can say to folks, and… what?'

Gelert was smiling. 'It wasn't much different on the farm.'

Poor Saler looked hopelessly confused.

'Good evening, Sal. I heard you coming in,' broke in a new voice coming from the upper landing. 'Good to see that you are back in one piece. Marrows' driving as mad as ever?' The speaker was an Inkling woman in long flannel nightclothes who called from the top of the stair, stifling a yawn with the back of a fine olive hand. To Gelert, it looked as if it had never strung a hook or mended a net in its owner's life. She returned his stare with a glance that was just as doubtful. 'This is the friend you wanted to bring to your uncle?' Her tone left little to the imagination as to just what  _her_  opinion was.

'Yep!' said Saler, beaming. He doesn't hear what she  _means_ , Gelert realized. 'Wommly, this is my Auntie Selca. Auntie, this is Womm– er, Gelert. He's  _good_  He won us our match today single-handed in the last minute! It was the freshest thing you've ever seen!'

'Your Uncle Hals will be quite eager to hear the story, I'm sure,' Saler's aunt answered with a smile that was cool around the edges. 'As for me, I could have done with a bit more notice, Sal. Half an hour is hardly time to arrange for hospitality. I am afraid that if your turfing-pal wishes to stay the night, it will be in your room.' Auntie Selca's eyebrows arched. 'Unless your friend would prefer I call Marrows to take him back in the car?'

'No!' answered Saler and Gelert at once, in two different shades of alarm.

'My room will be fine,' Saler went on. 'We'll need to go up there anyhow to get Womm– I mean, Gelert a change of clothes before we see Uncle. You know how he is.'

And all Gelert could see was his life flashing before his eyes again, through another dozen hairpin turns on the Inkopolis streets that night. He shuddered.

'Well,' Saler's aunt said, very nearly under her breath as she turned away from the railing, 'no one can say I did not try.' Then, louder: 'You two can find Hals down in the Cave. I will telephone down to let him know you are coming. Good night, Sal.'

'G'night!' Saler answered with a wave. His aunt retreated into what Gelert assumed must be a bedroom on the upper landing and latched the door behind her.

'Cave?' Gelert asked, more to cover up the stinging indifference hurled at him than from any real curiosity.

'Just  _wait_  until you see it, Wommly!' Saler said – which, of course, answered nothing. His green eyes were bright and eager, and he clapped Gelert on the shoulder, hard. 'But first, let's make you really look like a turfer! Trust me, it pays to make a good first impression on Uncle Hals. Come on–!'

' _No_ ,' Gelert tried to say – but by the time the word was on his break-points, Saler was already loping up the stairs with huge, bounding strides. Gelert thrust his hands into his pockets and followed after him.

'Here,' said Saler, making an eager gesture. 'In here!'

'Here' turned out to be one of the loudest, busiest, most chaotic spaces Gelert had ever seen. The House of Takoya was by and large arrayed sparsely with white walls and furnishings that resembled nothing so much as a postulate of Euclid; the walls were crying for a bit of homely ink-spatter from one of the younger squidlings, or a drape of pondflowers from the ornamental garden, or even some of Ompa Diu's home-grown piscine taxidermy, whose eyes always seemed to follow you all around the room. It was a model home for exactly the sort of dreary urbanity that Gelert had come to expect out of Inkopolis.

Saler Takoya had rebelled. His walls, every inch, were covered by posters of this or that brand (and given that bands and turf-stars were mixed with advertisements for tins of fish roe, it seemed to matter to him little just which) laid end-to-end with meticulous forethought to maximize the whitespace they eradicated. A whole bank of bookshelves claimed the northward side and were cluttered with figurines, all well-dusted, and were stuffed with glossy magazines and CD cases where the clutter left off. His closet was a cavern, and his wardrobe was a horde that bowed down the thick wooden bars on which it hung. His bed was a small, insignificant tangle of tousled sheets and blankets that had not been made. Off in a corner, covered in a patina of oil, dust, and neglect, stood a glassed-in barrister's bookcase. Behind the glass were only a very few dense sorts of books of the kind with titles like 'Treatise on…' and 'Course in…' whose spines were falling to shreds.

Yet there was a curious tidiness about it also: you could sense, without being told, that there was a scheme in mind as exacting as any ledger of accounts. It produced a warring bundle of impressions, and so Gelert just stood and stared, unable to even find the footing for a remark.

'Yeah,' said Saler with a sigh, seeing the expression on Gelert's mask. 'It  _could_  be fresher. But I'm always trying to make it better… what's wrong?'

After a long pause to wrestle his own thoughts, Gelert answered: 'We really aren't so different, are we?'

'No?' said Saler in the hesitating tones of someone who has been blindsided by something kind. 'I mean… no, I can't… see that we are. We're both Inklings, aren't we? And, er… we're about the same age, right? And we both turf, too, and from what I've seen, you've got real skills. That's enough for me, even if it isn't for… er… some people.'

'Do you mean that Rita girl?' said Gelert, seating himself unconsciously on Saler's small bed. He jumped up when the thought struck him with a jolt, too late, that it might be rude in Inkopolis.

'Oh, no. Go ahead,' Saler said distractedly. 'Yeah, her too, definitely. I've sometimes regretted falling in with her before now.' A sad smile spread over the boy's face as he seated himself next to Gelert.

'You're not the first I ever saw her go off on, either. I'd turfed alongside her for about three months, almost every day. We went through teammates like a minnow plate because none of them were ever good enough. She wanted to  _win_. I guess I stayed as long as I did because so did I. That's why we were in the Free Play room instead of the ranked leagues – our last teammate was a roller like Piev, though he wasn't half as good as she is. He couldn't aim for oysters, but he would always roll along with a stupid smile on just because he loved turfing for turfing. I liked him a lot. But he wasn't good enough for Rita. He didn't want to  _win_ , and she saw it before I did.'

'What about you?' said Gelert.

Again the fishbone-thin smile. 'I  _am_  good, Wommly. Rita wouldn't have kept me around if I wasn't.' He chuckled and fell backward, staring up at the white ceiling with his black mask half-lidded. 'I don't know how the Captain saw what I was so fast, but I  _am_  a squelcher. I've splatted a lot of people, Wommly. I like doing it almost as much as the turfing itself. I  _should_  have been able to see what she was like before today. Maybe I even did. Maybe I just didn't want to admit it. So… er… I don't know how to say this other than that I'm sorry.' Saler groaned and righted himself.

'Well, cousin? How about we get you a fresh look?'

The 'No' leapt at once to Gelert's beak tips. With a force of will that galled him a little, he swallowed it down again.

After all, some things were more important than winning.

 

* * *

 

Gelert felt odd. Silly, too – but mostly odd.

'You look fine, Wommly,' Saler assured him with a smile that was a little fuller than usual. 'It's a good fit for you. And this is one of those ever-fresh looks that won't up and die in a fortnight. You look like a real turfer now!'

Maybe, thought Gelert, that was exactly the issue. He felt back-to-front without his jerkin. Saler had  _hummed_  and pondered and rifled through his Brobdingnagian wardrobe like a squid-shaped whirlwind and had emerged with a bundle of clothes, neatly folded – Gelert could not help remembering old Senex telling the squidlings the old epics in the tromping old dactyls on fireside-nights – like a warrior returning home with the spoils of a long war.

'Yes! I  _know_  this will work! Try that on, Wommly.'

'There's no trousers?' Gelert said doubtfully. Saler's whole face seemed to rankle.

'Hate 'em. It's nothing but long leg-sleeves down at the Exchange. I  _never_  wear them unless I have to. You pull them off alright, but you have a sort of rustic look. I don't know how to describe it. They suit you, but I can't stand 'em.'

Gelert was not entirely certain he did not feel the same about leggings. There was no lack of Inklings who wore them, but together with the loose-fitting glossy jacket in blue and black and shiny purple they made Gelert feel as if he had gotten dressed standing on his head. They had a glassy-clear stripe right down the side that coaxed his native ink to the membrane surface, which was doubly strange: it was very nearly the same feeling as looking at an X-ray of yourself – like you had caught your insides at an indecent moment.

'You'll see,' said Saler, raising his hand. 'Uncle will be sure to take a shine to you now.' He rapped three times on the heavy red door in the basement he said was the entrance to 'the Cave'. The basement was much the same as the rest of the house, but that door did not fit. Like Saler's room, it was defiantly ornate. It was as if all of the bas-reliefs of the ancient turfing-games from a museum were condensed onto one carven plank of solid wood. It looked outrageously expensive.

'Sal? That you? Get  _in_  here if that's you!'

Saler winced, looking at Gelert. He also instantly obeyed. The door swung open on a groaning hinge into a room every bit as chaotic, in its own way, as Saler's. Bookcases towered on every side, stuffed on the lower shelves with the same dense sorts of 'Studies on…' and 'Principles of…' as in Saler's grimiest case – which looked as if they had never been once opened, let alone read. The upper shelves were nothing but a collection of decrepit and disassembled ink armaments for bric-a-brac, with three shelves taken up entirely by a sort of little shrine of old photographs and newsprint clippings, all around three silver-coloured trophies of an Inkling woman poised with a pitcher in her left hand and a spear in her right, which was a winding tentacle. There was a fireplace, one of those fake bricked-in models that ran off electricity, and a decanter of brandy, and a small water-powered fumoir chuffing out cloying white smoke that rolled in billows. And splayed in two huge armchairs with their backs to the fire in the middle of it all were two old squids just sucking in the atmosphere with little sucking pops. From the way the firelight caught the crystals of old ink that glittered all across their membranes, Gelert knew just at a glance that they were both nothing like healthy.

'Well?' barked the larger, the one with the pads of yellow fat around his black, sunken mask. He furled a fat-tipped tentacle at the two boys. 'All hail the conquering hero! Come in and let's have a better look at you two, eh?'

'My Uncle Hals,' Saler whispered urgently in Gelert's ear. 'The other's my father, Salzig.'

Gelert nodded grimly. He was liking this less and less with every step; and had Saler not been pulling him forward, he might have run from that room pell-mell, and devil take the hindmost. The pong of brine and tobacco in that close space was incredible. It was nothing like the hale smell of the sea-breeze that came off the old squids back on the farm. There was a foetid, brackish undertone in it that brandy and tobacco could not cover up. Couldn't Saler smell it, too?

'Well,' said the other, Saler's father, who at least did not look so terribly unwell. 'At least this one doesn't look so surly as the last turfer you brought home, Sal.'

'I'd rather surly,' said Saler's Uncle Hals, even as he draped a tentacle into a snifter to lick up brandy with quick, graceless twitches. 'Surly I can work with. Surly means there's something there that wants to prove itself. This one looks the part, but I'm not sold.' He eyed Gelert coolly, as if he had picked him up off the shelf in a store as a thing to be bought.

'He's good, Uncle,' said Saaler quietly.

'Is he, now?' The tentacle fell limpid into the brandy. Gelert could actually see it swelling and losing tone as he watched. A gasp of grey smoke burbled all at once out of the old squid, along with a sigh of grotesque satisfaction. 'Can't the boy answer for himself, Sal? You're asking a lot of your poor Uncle. A pageboy's not a thing you take up like a new hat or a pet. It's something you got to be sure about. There's sharks out in force in the Reef, nephew mine. You should know it by now.'

'You terrible liar,' said Saler's father with a deep, liquid chuckle. 'You've wanted another set of hands for months. Don't pretend you haven't.'

'And if I have?' Uncle Hals gruffed. 'That hardly changes facts. You! Boy. Stay right there. I want a close look at you. Don't you move!'

The tentacle swollen with brandy pulled itself up as Gelert watched. It seemed to hand numb and lifeless as the dilapidated squid changed – with what looked like a huge effort – into a man-shaped creature that might, generously, be called an Inkling. The liquid flesh flowed with a sticky torpor that could not have been only age, for the old squids were always spryer than that. Saler's uncle was very tall and very round, and was dressed in a robe with sleeves that draped nearly to the ground and covered with embroidered cranes. The brackish smell came off him in roils as he strode around Gelert, hands clasped, looking over the boy from all angles.

Gelert was surprised that he felt sorry for him.

'That's an awful fresh getup,' said Uncle Hals with a frown. 'I ought to know as I've seen it on about five others of you calstar hotshots over the lunch hour this last month. How long have you been turfing, boy?'

Gelert was feeling pricked and on edge from the way the grotesque squid kept circling him, and he answered instantly: 'about four years!' If you counted the games the squidlings had played back on the farm, it wasn't  _exactly_  a lie.

'Start 'em young where you come from, eh? Well, it's something at least.'

'He won us our match today single-handed, Uncle,' said Saler.

'Heh. I could do that once too.' Saler's uncle made a broad, vague gesture at the clutter all around. 'Those days are long, long behind. I keep my memories and my triumphs right here, in this room.'

'Not this again, Hals,' said Saler's father with a bubbling sigh. Uncle Hals ignored him with a deafening silence.

'That one, right there,' said the huge Inkling, jabbing at one of the little shrines on the shelf with a finger that still drooped from the brandy. 'Junior Turfers City-Wide, Six-Eight  _Anno Teuthorum_ , Second place. And that one–' another jab, more emphatic. 'Squidbeak Academy Varsity Turf Squad, Regional Championship,  _A.T._  Seven-One. Second place. And that!'

Saler's Uncle Hals sighed low and long, as if he was wrenched by bitter happiness. 'Calmarts Institute Turf Team. All-Conference Tournament.  _A.T._  Seven-Four. Second place! After that, it all fell apart.'

'You mean  _you_  did,' Saler's father added.

'It's all the same,' said Uncle Hals with a dim, distant echo of something like mournfulness. 'We never did climb up the ladder like we wanted, did we? Sometimes I think that we tried to hold on too long. We might have cut our losses and saved a world of trouble.'

'We did our best,' Saler's father replied. The way they were carrying on these weary reminiscences like a joyless catechism made it clear to Gelert that this was far from the first, nor would it be the last time this exchange had happened right here, in this room. Just now, neither he nor Saler were even there.

'We always did. Only it was never quite good enough.' Then, without warning, Uncle Hals rounded on Gelert. He loomed like a living mountain. 'Six years I spent turfing, trying to make my name in this city. I played charger the whole time. I was a  _born_  backliner. Salzig here was my front man. We played a  _mean_  flank attack. What about you, boy?'

Gelert swallowed. 'I have been told I am a backliner,' he said carefully, not at all sure that it was the right answer.

'And yet Sal says you won a match "single-handed." Funny, that.'

'I wasn't making it up!' Saler half-whimpered. Gelert could hear the nerves in his voice.

'I didn't say you were, Sal. But it is unusual. Your friend is… not usual.' Gelert felt pinned to the floor by the stare Saler's Uncle Hals gave him just then.

'Gelert, is it?' said the huge Inkling after a long silence. 'You listen to an old squid for a minute, and you listen hard. I let Sal have his fill of turfing because, Sea take me, I still love the game. I think he might even make something of himself in it. But I had to admit in the end that I wasn't going to make it. I wasn't going to get my name in lights in the Square like all of us wanted back then. You all probably aim a lot higher than that. Probably you'd like your name on a tiny screen you have to squint at to see! But I had to find another game. And when I found it, I found I played it dripping well. And because Saler's wasn't always going to be able to pick up his pistols, I make him play my game, too. So let's get down to the Rules, boy.'

Uncle Hals settled himself back into his armchair with an unsteady sway backwards, as if his legs had suddenly lost all tone.

'Apparently, you can turf well. That's good. I like turfers. They tend to take to  _my_  game like catfish to chum. But you want to be my pageboy? I will expect a lot. And you want to turf while you do it? That's good. I like a pageboy with some ambition. Anything you see that you want for turfing? You want some spangly gear or that clean new rifle? It's yours.  _But_ –' Uncle Hals leaned his whole body forward. Even seated, the huge Inkling seemed suddenly to fill the whole room, corner to corner, right into the shadows.

'But–' Uncle Hals repeated, 'YOU HAD BETTER DELIVER, BOY. I had better see gold in your hands, and not this… this… stinking SILVER!' He shouted the last with such violence that little flecks of oily sputum peppered Gelert, stinging where they landed on his membrane.

'Is that agreed?' said Uncle Hals, the fury draining out of him just as quickly as it had come.

'Yes!' Gelert half-squeaked, wanting to turn, to run, to fly back up the stairs, back to Saler's room, back to the Square, even back to the Hostel with its musty beds and noisy dormitories – anywhere to be away from  _here_!

Of course, his feet were rooted to the spot.

'Now, Hals,' said Saler's father, closing his eyes. 'You're scaring the pageboys.'

'So I am.' Uncle Hals slumped trembling back into his chair. He waved a swollen hand with another vague gesture before it started to melt and droop as Saler's uncle began, with clenched eyes and clear discomfort, to squid himself once again. By the time he had finished with the change, all of his tentacles draped limp and lifeless over the front and arms of his chair. Uncle Hals looked utterly exhausted.

'Oh, do go on, Sal, and leave us be. I'll have some figures to go over with you at breakfast tomorrow. And you.' He opened one eye, halfway, on Gelert. 'No chance you're going anywhere tonight. I'll expect you to eat with the family in the morning. Consider it your first order.'

 _More orders_ , Gelert seethed. Oh, certainly, why not?

'Come on, Wommly,' said Saler, laying a hand on Gelert's shoulder again. For once, Gelert did not in the least feel like writhing himself away. 'You… you look tired. We should try to get some sleep.'

That, Gelert knew, was just wishful thinking.


	4. Stocks & Bonds -- Part 1

'Oh, no trouble at all, I'm sure!' Miss Marrows huffed, putting the last touches on four tight hospital-corners with her many-too-many proboscises. If the cumber hadn't been so snappish, the sight of all those half-limbs moving independently, cool and businesslike as a battalion, might have mesmerized Gelert. As it was, the little nanny just intimidated him – more than all the old squids put together, who could at least look you in the eye before they reamed you up and down.

'No, it's a pleasure to bring the settee up from the downstairs drawing room! Delightful to get down the guest linens when you've only just been able to put thirty writhing pounds of Inkling down for the night! Oh, but do I complain? No, never – I suffer all these, and wear my flesh down to the weary nub, and I do it all out of my own good nature.  _Never_  has old Marrows been ill-used!'

There was a great deal more like that. Saler had clearly heard this litany of longsuffering before, times beyond counting. He simply threw out his thin smile every so often and gave a reassuring 'oh, yes' in response to some plaintive new depth of self-pity. The cumber seemed to like that, as she kept piling miseries and drudgeries all on the back of 'poor old Marrows!' By the time she had got 'round to shriveling up for worry every time Saler had the fool sense to step out on some turfinig-ground where he might be killed, or maimed, or crushed, or mauled, or drowned, and didn't anyone think of faithful marrows saying her decades on her old clamshell chaplet, never knowing if poor Saler was alive or dead, Saler finally broke in with a crisp:

' _Thank_  you, Marrows – and mightn't there be lobster tails at breakfast next morning? For my friend?'

The cumber brightened at once – at least, as much as anything without a face could. It was hard to tell. 'Oh, no difficulty! No trouble at all! Let's just have old Marrows rise at the break of day and drudge at the range for hours in a dead-quiet house, just waiting to be robbed! But if you must have them, you must.'

After the cumber had slithered her way out and crashed the door shut behind her, Gelert said to Saler:

'That was deft.'

'You just have to know what to aim for,' Saler replied from the middle of the tangle of plastic sheets and insulating blankets that were proof against nighttime oil runs when you were sleeping squidwise. Gelert could not fathom how anyone could be comfortable like that. The old squids would have made an awful fuss if any of the children had left a flounder's mess of a bed like that behind in the morning.

'I really would have been fine with just an ink bowl,' Gelert said, looking at the corner Miss Marrows had just tucked. It was a shame even to undo a fold that tight. 'Sometimes we didn't even get that much, if one of us was ill.'

Saler stretched himself back out boy-shaped in an instant. There was an expression of blank horror on his mask. 'You mean you go to sleep  _dissolved_?'

'Sometimes,' said Gelert, blinking at him. Hadn't he ever been sick and just needed a long soak? Gelert decided to ask.

A shiver ran down Saler's long body. 'I envy you, Wommly. I really do. I have a dream like that, sometimes. In it, I'm turfing on Moray Towers, same as today. I'm doing fine – great, in fact. I'm covering ground quick as you can flicker squid-and-back, I'm swimming at the front of the line, ahead of everyone else, and I never miss a shot. The match is all locked up. Then comes the countdown, and when it comes, I'm always in the same spot: going right up the ramp toward the enemy base. Right about where you were, now that I think about it.'

Saler pulled his knees up to his chest. 'Then, just like you had turned a switch, it's night, and I can't hear the battle going on around me any more. All I can hear is the countdown – on and on, down to zero. I try to swim on, but I can't. I try to pull myself together to get back up out of the ink and have a look around, but I can't even do that – I've let myself get spread too far out, and I'm too diluted to put myself back together again.'

'The worst part is after that. You know how even when you've gone to ink, you can feel that not-right prickle that lets you know there's the wrong hue up ahead?'

Gelert nodded. 'Like the first cramp you get of a bad stomachache.'

'Exactly! Only it's coming from  _everywhere_. Every time, I'm stuck there, and suddenly I'm floating over  _me_  down there in the ink, and I have to watch myself as the enemy ink closes in on me, everywhere I look. I just have to wait for it to come, and all the time, I can feel myself down below getting sicker until all that's left of my colour is one little spatter-puddle. There's only a few seconds left, but I can finally pull myself back together again. I come up gasping, but there's nowhere to run to. You know what happens then?'

Gelert did not, but Saler did not wait for a response. He plunged straight on, eyes fixed on a haberdasher's logo in the patchwork of the wall. Gelert was not sure he was even seeing that. 'It's always in the last ten seconds, right before old Judd calls time. Even his hollering cuts out over the PA, and everything goes awfully quiet – just for a moment. It always seems to last a year. Then I can feel – I swear it – I can  _feel_  Uncle coming up behind me. Only I never, ever  _see_ him. All of a sudden, just as the countdown ends, I feel his hand on my shoulder. And he says:

_It's time you gave it a rest, Sal._

When Saler broke down, he did it quietly. The other boy just seemed to fold in on himself and melt: you could see his native ink roiling, lemon-yellow, and all the while he never made a sound. He just shook, and shook, silently.

Gelert sat down beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. Saler raised his mask, streaked with oily yellow, up to face him. He was not smiling.

'I want to  _win_ , Wommly. I'd give anything to make it big, go pro. But I also know that Uncle is… he's probably right. Most turfers never get inside a charger shot of getting that good. And I know  _I_  haven't yet, either. I've never won anything major. I've never even had the chance – Rita could never keep two teammates long enough to enter anything. Maybe that was half the reason I went with the Captain. Maybe that's why you're here, too. I don't know – I'm… I'm sorry if it is.'

Gelert did not say anything. Saler was one of those people who had to remember their thoughts by putting them on the outside. Gelert let his arm go to squid and gave what he thought might ( _might_  – he was coming to learn that it was difficult to predict a Saler) be a reassuring squeeze.

' _Thanks_ , Wommly,' Saler said. He said it in the raw, desperately grateful tones of someone who has just laid his whole soul out for you.

'We should probably get some sleep,' said Gelert. 'For the tournament.' It was the only thing he could think of  _to_  say.

'I… think you're right,' replied Saler, with sudden verve. He clapped Gelert hard upon the back. It smarted, but this time, it did not feel all bad. 'We've got a match to play tomorrow! See you in the morning, cousin.'

Gelert had to slide himself into those hospital corners in one long liquid sheet. He felt awfully splayed-out for sleeping at first; but he decided after a few minutes, once he had begun to drift off (in spite of his thoughts full of smokey dens, Octolings, and eyes behind mirrored lenses that you could not see, but which never stopped looking you up and down), that he could get well-used to hospital corners. It was, at any rate, nice than the Hostel back in the Square.

Just as he was about to nod off, Saler's voice said out of the dark:

'Hey, Wommly? There's something that's been bothering me. How's the Captain pull off all those crack shots if he's only got one good eye? It's  _weird._ '

'Go to sleep, Saler.'

It didn't stop the dreams full of one, bulging eye from coming. Not even hospital corners could keep  _that_  out.

 

* * *

 

You would not think, Gelert reflected as they entered the nautically-styled dining nook paneled in white wood, whose ropey drapes and hanging flywheels made the ultramodern rest of the House of Takoya seem more stark by comparison – you would not think that disorder could light upon a place like this. But just as the antiseptic interior betrayed nothing of the hideaway sanctuaries further in, perhaps you had to stay inside for a while to see there was life there after all. And most of it seemed to be concentrated in the sticky arms of one six-year squidling.

'Bruh-bruh!' Io cawed with delight, landing on Saler's back with a near-prescient flying leap. Saler staggered and fell half-liquid onto the ground, taken so by surprise that he did not know quite whether to squid himself as he fell or not, and so landed somewhere in the messy in-between.

'Easy, Io. Easy.' There was a tiredness dry as dust in the boy's voice, as if he had slept but very poorly. Gelert knew better; he had seen the eager light ebb out of Saler's eyes the instant he had slipped on the starch white oxford and crisp black slacks (as he said, with a sigh) were what you wore, all the time, down at the Reef. When the tie bar went on (which was almost certainly solid silver), it was as if a mask had been placed over the young Inkling's face. The smile on that face was big, broad, and beaky.

'Well, cousin? Shall we?' said Saler with a laugh. 'Can't swim the Reef without some tuck, eh?'

Gelert did not like it one bit.

'Well, don't you look a fine trawl this morning!' cooed Miss Marrows, whisking the clinging Io with a pseudopod quick as a whipcrack, and strong as cord. 'One might even believe a boy like that could make something of himself.'

'It will do, I think,' said Uncle Hals from the head of the long table, where he sat in front of a droning television panel set into the wall like a window. He was similarly garbed, with the sole concession of a single embroidered crane on his black necktie. 'The weapons might be different, but the clothes make the man all the same, eh? Once you've both quite done with filling your stomachs, do let's be off, Sal. I'll be relying on you out on the floor today; I've booked one of the side-rooms for the whole day. Uncle has some wars to fight, my boy – and I'm sending  _you_  out on the frontline.'

Saler bobbed his head eagerly; but Gelert could see his shoulders slump.

'Where's Dad?' he said, looking around at the table, as if there were somewhere to hide.

'Ah.' Marrows looked, just for a moment, as abashed as a creature without a face could. 'I am afraid that your father is indisposed this morning, Master Saler. Naturally, he sends his apologies for his absence and his best wishes for your success today.'

'Stupid Disposed!' Little Io scowled at the lobster claw on her plate. 'Papa's always going there! I wish he'd just stay around!'

'Some folk, Io my dear,' Uncle Hals said, 'just aren't meant for battle.'

'Do you have to talk like that, Hals?' said Saler's Auntie Selca down at the other end of the table, where she sat nursing an eggshell of coffee in the same flannel pajamas as the night before.

'And why mayn't I speak the truth at my own breakfast-table?' Uncle Hals rejoined, with affable fury. There was a boyish glint in his eye like that of an actor who has just realized he has the undivided attention of a shackled audience. 'If the rest of the whole rishreek city wants to scoop out its own brain-bogs in front of a screen and forget what made it great, Hals Takoya won't be joining them. War – it's been war down the line, all war, from  _A.T._  One 'til now. Only no one now has the courage to sell a thing for what it is! Well, no one of this family is a no one!  _We_  all know a thing doesn't change just because you've put a "turf" alongside it – or even if you give a name no one blinks at when they read a Business section of a paper. I tell you, boy,' Uncle Hals jabbed his swollen forefinger at Gelert, 'it was  _war_  that put those lobsters in that pot standing there. And let  _that_  be your first lesson of the day! Swallow it! Recite it! Put it down in glyphs for frontlets: I don't care how, so long as you  _learn_  it. War. Is. Business.' Uncle Hals paused for effect, throwing a smile that pulled back from his blunted beak points. 'And Business. Is. War! Got any questions?'

Gelert nodded his head; once you got Uncle Hals out of the miasma of the Cave and on the other side of pot of lobsters, he did not seem anything like so smoothly intimidating. Gelert could half-imagine the Captain and his blank lenses smirking at that kind of talk. Uncle Hals himself had a little of the air of one's Sol's Day homilist from the village who would tread the boards at the front of the little kelpthatch chapel as he poured life and colour into every one of his illustrations for his sermon – and usually over-measured. It made Gelert bold enough to ask a question:

'Why do you have a screen behind you if they only make you dumber?'

The yellow pads of fat around Uncle Hal's eyes narrowed. 'There is a difference,' the huge Inkling said, glowering, 'between watching a screen and it watching  _you_. This is for research. Sal, once you've quite done mangling that innocent crustacean, you're to peruse that folio there – and don't you let any grease drip on it! I've paid my man good money for everything there is to know about this GrizzCo I've been seeing tick up and up on the tape. Whatever they're doing, it's a bang-up good job. Twenty-four-aught-eight a share at the closing bell yesterday! Now listen, Sal. I may be an old hand at this game, but this GrizzCo has taken your Uncle by surprise. And I  _don't_  like being surprised. I want to get out in front of it, but we're going to be playing from behind. Twenty-four-aught-eight! Where was this GrizzCo when I was coming up in the ranks?' Uncle Hals shook his huge head; it was a bit like watching a volcano trembling before an eruption.

'You've got instincts, Sal. Use them! I want anything and everything you can get connected with this Grizz – stocks, futures, waterfront land, I don't care what. I'll be meeting with my people in the meantime to see if I have any inroads to the man himself. And  _you_ ,' Uncle Hals said, glaring at Gelert. 'You see that Sal has what he needs. Otherwise, you watch – and  _learn_.' The latter was spoken with such an earnest force that Gelert just what else he could mean.  _What_  was he supposed to learn?

'This doesn't make any sense.' Saler said through lobster tail, shell and all, dripping with warm oil and heavy with the earthy zip of celery seed and onion. He swallowed it down and continued to eat with a distracted voracity. The puzzled expression on his mask only deepened as his eyes flicked to-and-fro over the pages of the thin folio. 'From these figures, GrizzCo doesn't have a single product out on the market – but they've set up dummy corporations sometimes three deep just for acquisitions. It's oddjob stuff, too: radios, coolers, Styrofoam, old fishing schooners… I can't see any connection.'

'Consider it a personal challenge,' Uncle Hals said. The huge Inkling's eyes twinkled with a hungry glint. It reminded Gelert of something, a dreadful something, that remained nonetheless just out of his reach when he tried to remember. 'Marrows, get the car ready. I want to be on the road in a quarter-hour. And you boy – eat quick and light. A soldier can't afford to eat on the march. Not too much, either! We'll be on the Floor all day today. Fill up your oil now!'

'He means,' Auntie Selca whispered smoothly into Gelert's ear, 'that he doesn't intend to stop for lunch.' Gelert had been afraid of that.

Still, he obeyed, eagerly; it was one order that he did not, for the moment, mind taking. Perhaps it was the very strangeness of the surroundings, or that the food was so much better than the  _kombu_ -and-clam paste you could buy at the hostels for half a gold piece, or maybe even the sort of old-fashioned hunger you get when your appetite roars to life after you have too long forgotten food for other things. Gelert ate like an army. There were, of course, the lobsters, done up as red and steaming and beautiful as Mommaw Carpacci ever made; there were the trenchers of sweet bread, golden outside and puffy-white inside, with pots of dolphin cream and a thick savoury chutney of seaweed with tiny spicy water-onions; there were smoked prawns and a plate of claggy brined salmon that bit the back of your throat with hot spice and coriander; there were even oysters on the half-shell with lemon, which even most of the old squids could never stomach, let alone the squidlings back on the farm – but Gelert loved them. He had quite a lot of those, and at least a double portion of everything else. It was  _all_  wonderful.

It dawned on Gelert only gradually, with a hot, prickling feeling, that he was being stared at. He looked up and saw that not only Uncle Hals, but also Saler's Auntie Selca (who was holding her little eggshell of coffee, gone quite cold, between the very tips of her fingers far away from her body, and looked faintly nauseated), Miss Marrows (who turned from her constant fussing with Saler's sister to regard Gelert with a stare that was somehow  _more_  intense for being eyeless), and even little Io (who gawped with the same wide-eyed wonder usually reserved for music idols and circus clowns, and who quite forgot the toast bowing under a mound of jam between her undifferentiated hands) – all were fixing him with a kind and degree of attention he was not at all sure that he liked. He laid the oyster he had been about to raise up to his mouth back down on the platter with a half-croaked 'sorry' that went scarcely farther than his own ears.

Saler did not look up. He was lost in a world of black-and-white figures. Gelert envied him.

'I think, Marrows,' said Saler's aunt finally, laying down her eggshell with a very final gesture as she rose from the table, 'that it may be wise to go to the market today if Saler's guest will be staying on.  _Will_  he be staying on, Sal?'

'Oh!' Saler jolted up and blinked around at the table like a boy who has been caught sleeping in class. 'Er… yes?'

'That will, of course, be up to the  _guest_ ,' Uncle Hals said, a pensive, calculating looking coming over his features. When he looked at Gelert, it was hard to say whether he was seeing the Inkling sitting there in the chair, or some future prospect. ' _Very_  unusual,' Uncle Hals added in a rumbling undertone that the whole room could hear, clear as a thunderclap.

'Well!' said Miss Marrows in a preening sort of huff. 'I think it is a fine thing to finally have one's efforts go appreciated! If the young master's guest  _must_  eat a family who can barely put food on the table out of house and home, it's a small price to pay to finally serve a good appetite!'

' _Cooool_.' That was little Io. 'You can  _fit_  all that?'

Saler's Auntie Selca cleared her throat and left to have a quiet headache in private upstairs. Miss Marrows fussed her feathery fronds at Io and left to carry the squealing girl and her jammy mess somewhere it would be easier to clean both. Only Gelert, Saler, and Uncle Hals remained around the table.

'When you have quite had your fill, boy,' said the mountainous Inkling, rising from his chair like a thunderhead,' you will go with Saler out to the car.' He regarded Gelert with the same unsettling look. ' _I_ ,' said Uncle Hals, with a booming smile, 'have a phone call to make.'

Just then, Gelert recalled what the look in Uncle Hals' eyes reminded him of.

It was sharks.

Their eyes sparkled dead and black like that, too.

 

* * *

 

'Is that the Reef?' Gelert said doubtfully. It did not exactly look like the sort of place you wore the sort of thing Saler was wearing.

'No,' Saler replied, pointing beyond the retail suites and café kiosks facing the broad, terraced green that seemed stitched onto the concrete and asphalt like a patch upon a drab grey coat, up toward a towering edifice of glinting coral-brick on a hill beyond. ' _That's_  the Reef, the Exchange, up there. The shops down below just took the name when they were put in by the jellyfish a few years ago. The builders couldn't get anyone to stop using the name, so eventually they stopped trying.'

'Sensible, I call it!' Uncle Hals boomed, oozing himself out of the pearly-white car they had driven over in with a panting effort. (He had had to drive over while squidded, he was so huge. Saler had been able to keep his eyes on his figures, but with the gagging-strong smell of brackish old squid in even closer quarters than the Cave had been, Gelert would almost rather have had Marrows driving again – but only almost.) Uncle Hals pointed with a fat finger down at the green where a great many Inklings, all young, loitered in more or less the same three or four studied poses of shifty-eyed indifference. Some slouched aggressively on the railing of the small bridge in the center that spanned an asphalt footpath beneath; some yawped at each other in high, carrying voices while they drank a cold, sweet, oily sludge through straws that Gelert supposed must pass for breakfast in Inkopolis; still others crouched like predatory birds, looking out from behind masks and ventilators, watching their fellows with peering malice. Every one of them carried either the brass bell of a Matic-series, or the long white fusillade of a charger, or the tell-tale black case of an Inkbrush on their backs.

'Look at them!' Uncle Hals said as they passed by. He did not seem to feel the pricks of their sharp-eyed glares on his back.  _Adult_ , they sneered wordlessly, one to another, on down the line so that by the time Uncle Hals had gone a third of the way across the green, every Inkling knew that the three were coming and met them with the same cold face and stony silence. Uncle Hals basked in the hostile atmosphere.

'Just  _look_  at them!' he repeated. 'Do you suppose a one of them knows they are looking at their future?'

As Uncle Hals seemed perfectly content to let the question hang in the air, and it didn't seem like the sort of question you were  _supposed_  to answer anyhow, Gelert said to Saler: 'what  _are_  they doing, anyhow?'

'Don't you know?' Saler said. 'Turf wars open up from 1100 to 1300. There's another hour window for pro games in the evening. Sometimes it's easier to get a shot in the lists on-site instead of going through the Tower in the Square if you don't have a team.'

So they were doing what Gelert had been doing: waiting for the one game, the one chance you had to make an impression in Inkopolis. And it was only 0748. 'They'll be waiting a while,' Gelert said, not too loud.

'Yeah,' said Saler, looking backward with a longing glance at the venom aimed at their retreating backs as they mounted the steps to the Exchange speckled with mother-of-pearl.

'Come on, come  _on_!' said Uncle Hals, puffing as they took the last few. His fingers trembled as the revolving glass doors whisked them inward. 'We have a game to win! Ready for the bell, Sal.?'

'Yeah,' Saler replied grimly. He cocked his head as they emerged out of the doors. 'You ready, Wommly?'

'For what?" said Gelert. It was all that he could think off to keep from gawping at the place.

'For the  _game_ , boy!' Uncle Hals said, barking a full-throated laugh into the din of that huge, thronging space, where it was at once swallowed up and merged into the deafening drone of voices. Every inch beyond those doors was crammed with people of every possible shape and extraction. There were plenty of Inklings, all wearing the same, ravening, dark-eyed expression on their masks, with their eyes turned upward toward a great screen showing files on files and rank upon rank of obscure flyphs and figures in polychrome lights; but among the press there was also the odd bobbing head of a jellyfish, here a scuttling creature low to the floor strewn with crumpled papers, hefting its eyestalks up to the board, there a hulking bulk of barnacles whiffling through an unseen mouth who would not have seemed out of place down at the Inkopolis docks. It did not seem to matter at all what shape you were in order to wear the square badge on your chest which seemed to be everywhere in evidence, and which Saler, Uncle Hals, and Gelert all donned after receiving them from a Inkling in a yellow blazer. She smiled at Uncle Hals as she dealt them out like cards.

'Bringing up another apprentice, Takoya?' she asked, grinning widely.

'Just a pageboy getting his mantle moist,' Uncle Hals said with a hand on Gelert's shoulder, hard and heavy. "Keep an eye out so he doesn't get trampled.'

'I'll have a word with the brokers,' she said – just before going to squid, right in the full view of everyone, and rocketing away across the Pit with a jet of ink that was so well-controlled it did not even spatter. She hung for a moment beneath the panes of glass that formed the roof, where a school of flitting shrimp and skyfishes parted to let her by, and landed lightly by a terrace of desks to confer with a hand of other Inklings in the same yellow blazers.

'The glyphs on the badge stand for Takoya Free Traders,' Saler was explaining, along with a good deal about how you could tell just who was who, and buying what, and how the skyfish would take the tickets for your order – they were called  _bids_ , here – and run it to a clerk at the octagon desks in the middle of the Pit, but Gelert was lucky to catch what little he did. He was trying very hard not to vomit.

'Steady, Sal,' Uncle Hals said, looking up at the wall clock. 'One minute to the bell. You have a plan?'

'Yeah,' said Saler, as if he did not care one way or another. 'Pick up as much GrizzCo as I can after the bell, then go for fishing commodities. It looks like they've been swinging ever since GrizzCo went public, so there's a lot of potential gain there. Cannery futures after that, then ink-arms bonds, and – I  _think_  – it might be worth going after some of the smaller biotech markets. I'm not really sure why, but their revenue numbers have jumped since GrizzCo started trading. That could just be coincidence, though.'

'In this game, coincidence means, "I got lucky on a trade." No, no, spare me the details! I'm not looking for luck!' Uncle Hals snapped as Saler opened up his beak to reply. 'I brought you up to have a gut like mine! I expect you to use it, Sal!'

Saler's shoulders slumped even lower.

'Yes, sir.'

'And you, boy!' Uncle Hals went on, suddenly turning the enormous full of his attention onto Gelert. 'Don't you dare forget that you've got your suckers in the game now, too! You make sure as the seas that you learn what this game and this place are  _about_. What's more –' Uncle Hals' features softened; he still loomed like a mountain, only less now like one ready to cleave off its own face to bury you with. 'You keep an eye out, too. You see your teammate dying out there, you pick him up and  _get out of the Pit_.'

The black cloud returned. ' _Understood_ , boy?'

It was all Gelert could do to nod.

'Good,' said Uncle hals with something that might generously be called a smile. 'Then shift your slimy rears and  _get into that Pit!_ ' Saler's Uncle punctuated the last with a violent gesture and a rain of inky sputum. Saler seized Gelert by the wrist and began to drag the dazed boy into that press of all kinds of flesh, setting his face stonily forward as the crowd all around whispered a countdown from fifteen, all eyes on the wall clock above the massive polychrome board.

'Got to get into position,' Saler prated as the two stepped through the crowd like a drowning man thrashing for air; and they were not the only ones trying to do just that. 'Before –'

The bells sounded. In fact, they wailed, they boomed, they howled and growled and chimed and groaned high and low, crashing and tinkling all through Gelert's body like a man shaking you hard by the shoulders. They rolled on, and on, and on; and not a second passed once they had stopped before a swell of voices took their place – Inkling voices, high and piping; jelly voices with their tenor pit-a-pat; the clacking baritone of crustaceans; and the imperious basso song of abyssal  _things_  that Gelert did not dare name. All were calling the same tune – numbers, numbers, numbers. Saler's was among them.

'One-thousand GRZ! Two-five aurum!' Saler's voice carried high and clear over the clamour and was punctuated by a boneless undulation of the boy's arm gone quite liquid as he raised it aloft. Another boy, an Inkling with very round, thick spectacles and a brown newsboy's cap, who was conspicuously clad in a yellow blazer and stood in the middle of one of the eight-sided desks like buoys in the mosh of sea life, acknowledged the gesture and poised a fine-nibbed pen over a paper billet, inking the tip in his mouth.

'Counter two-five-aught-two for the 'kay!' The jellyfish's bubbling yell hardly carried at all, but the tentacles he raised up over the heads of the crowd, crooked into numerical glyphs, made the message abundantly plain. The boy in the yellow blazer nodded and pointed his pen at Saler, eyebrows raised expectantly.

'Two-five-aught-eight!' Saler called.

'Ten!' the jellyfish signaled, jumping and gesticulating wildly.

Saler's beak champed. 'One-two!'

'Twenty-aught flat! Final offer!' The jellyfish signaled the latter by drawing his tentacles one over another with a cutting motion. Then he pulled down his distended appendages and looked up at Saler with a triumphant, mouthless sneer. Saler hesitated.

'One-thousand shares of GrizzCo, offering twenty-eight-twenty aurum per share,' said the Inkling in the yellow blazer in crisp tones, unmoved by the eddying chaos on the other side of the desks. His pen hovered a millimeter over the pad of papers in his hand. 'Are there any counters?'

'Twenty-five aurum!' Saler bellowed. He clapped his hand over his mouth the instant after the words had leapt from his beak-tips. His membrane seemed to go ghastly-frail; his face seemed for a moment to be nothing  _but_  a horrified roil of yellow ink.

'I have one-thousand shares of GrizzCo, offering twenty-five aurum per share,' the Inkling in the yellow blazer said calmly. He stuck the nib of his pen into his mouth and cast a querying look around at the other faces clustered around the desk. No other hands or voices went up. Several people backed away a pace. The jellyfish just gave an undulating shrug. A quiet like the abrupt ritual calm of the village church before Sol's Day services seemed to fall on the ring of creatures surrounding the desk, and it was just as imperiously obeyed. Saler looked sick.

The Inkling in the yellow glazer nodded and let his pen finally fall on his paper billet. He scrawled a quick and practiced something and held up the paper in his hand, where it was at once snatched up by one of the prawns fluttering down below the roof and carried to one of the yellow blazers ringed like a string of pearls around the periphery of the Pit. A hundred others, mingled with the fluttering skyfish carrying tight-rolled messages, were descending alongside it, porting billets just like the one between its tiny pincers. Then, quick as blinking, they were gone, whisked away deeper into the Reef, the yellow blazers carrying them changed in the next moment for other faces, other jackets that looked just like them.

'What have I done?' Saler said, clenching and unclenching his hands. 'What have I done?'

'Saler?'

'Why? Why did I spend so much? Nothing keeps rising forever. There's no guarantee GrizzCo will rise up later today! It could all fall again. For all I know, it probably will! What  _do_  I know about GrizzCo, anyway? Nothing – nothing!' the boy said in a frantic monotone that was almost entirely lost in the roar of the Pit. His eyes were sunken into his mask as he looked at Gelert. 'Wommly, what will I do if I lose it all?'

Gelert did not have an answer to that. But he did well recall how Pa Muscombe, who never held with hysterics, had calmed Gelert down one night after Ompa Diu had drunk up the last of Mommaw Carpacci's crayfish broth at supper before Gelert had had a chance to have any – it would probably work here, too.

'Uncle will probably never let me trade again,' Saler's downward spiral continued. 'But I have to trade if I want to turf! That's his rule! But if he won't let me, I don't know how I'm ever going to—'

Gelert raised his hand, let it broaden into a tentacle, and struck Saler across the face, hard enough to knock him down. When the other boy rose, eyes wide, he was nursing a purple inkwelt trailing violet threads into Saler's yellow ink underneath as it shrunk.

'Thanks, Wommly,' Saler said. He sounded as sincere as a psalm. He clenched his hands behind him. 'Er… should we get back to trading? We shouldn't be… I mean, we have a lot of work to do if we're going to make money today.'

If this was how you made  _real_  money, Gelert thought, he wasn't at all sure he wanted it.


End file.
